


I'll Keep Coming

by PastelPrinceling



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Autopsies, Blood and Gore, Dissociation, Drugs, Emetophobia, Fake AH Crew, Immortality, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Paranoia, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-02
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-12 16:08:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7940785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelPrinceling/pseuds/PastelPrinceling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can swear he can see him out of the corner of his eye, that he can see him lingering. Waiting. Ryan doesn't know what to make of this kid, but he knows for a fact, Ray is dangerous.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Subway

**Author's Note:**

> An ongoing scary spooky story in the spirit of Halloween, a sort of fic exchange with a pal, short weekly (maybe biweekly) chapters! Expect a lot of suspense and mystery. Hit up [my tumblr](http://pastelprinceling.tumblr.com/) and you might get some questions answered, or some tidbits Ao3 won't get!

With hands clasped, the sensation of his thumb running along the line of an angry scar had long since grown fuzzy in his mind. Staring off into the middle distance, the feel of his skin against itself had hazed into a buzzing up his arms. The rattle of the subway was distant, the spot of rust on the floor looked a hundred feet away and at the same time, as if it were only two inches away.

Ryan had been in this state for a good while, a few hours at least, wandering the city with his jacket pulled up and his face tucked in to try to shield himself from the mist of rain. He wasn’t quite sure where he was, and honestly didn’t mind considering he wasn’t even present enough to regard the people around him.

Now and then he got strange looks from other people on the street, and in the subway car he’d been in for at least a dozen stops. His hands were tucked deep into the pockets of his jacket. Ryan hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d just woken in a rough state. The aura the night before probably should have clued him in to deciding against going out today, but he had shit to do and he wasn’t about to let his loose grasp on self and reality keep him from that.

It’s not like he had much of a choice anyway.

The hair on the back of his neck stood on end and it was like a light switch being flipped, coming back to reality painfully hard. It left him reeling, left his head pounding. Ryan grit his teeth to try to shake the feeling, his body hypersensitive, the seat under him hard, the weight of the blade tucked into the holster on his back heavy, pulling him off balance. His hands pulsed where he’d spent god only knew how long tracing the same patterns across his skin.

The car pulled to a stop at the next station and the doors opened. People filed out. People filed in.

A kid plopped down heavily in the seat next to him and Ryan’s arm prickled with goosebumps before he glanced over at him.

He wasn’t looking at Ryan, focused instead on his phone. A mop of curly, too long hair, a beanie, and a well loved purple hoodie. Both the drawstrings were frayed. The backpack strapped to one shoulder was unceremoniously crushed under him where he was sitting.

It might have been the same stop, or six stops later that he realized he was staring. The kid next to him hadn’t moved, hadn’t batted an eye at Ryan’s gaze heavy on him. He didn’t care. Ryan wondered idly if that’s what he seemed like when he dissociated, so far removed from reality and the world that it didn’t matter who looked at him, who spoke to him, he wasn’t there. Just a ghost of a man, really.

“Are you going to stare all day?”

Ryan’s heart leapt to his throat and his eyes focused suddenly, making his head pound more, focusing on the kid’s face. He hadn’t spoken up. He hadn’t moved. Ryan looked away then, at the woman across the car staring at him.

All he could manage was a rough, croaked out, “What?”

“I asked you if you were going to stare at him all day? It’s really rude.”

Ryan looked her over again, then back at the kid who hadn’t moved, still. His thin brows were pressed tight in confusion. She widened her own eyes to mimic his confused look, pressing, “Are you a fish? Stop gaping. Staring is rude.”

“So is sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

The second voice not his own piping up made Ryan’s blood run cold, brought a fresh wave of chills up his arm, a sensation he felt all the way up his neck and across his cheek. Beside him the younger man had tensed a little, minutely, but he hadn’t looked up from his phone. It had been him that had spoken up, Ryan was sure of it.

The woman’s face scrunched, twisting in displeasure. A bit of a pout, really. She crossed her arms across her chest, watching Ryan as she spoke to him, “Are you really okay with him just staring at you like that?”

“We’re friends, lady. He’s keeping an eye on me,” and under his breath, though just loud enough for her to still hear him, he muttered, “People, man.”

Eyes flicking back up at her, Ryan watched as she realized where she’d made a mistake, and the tension in her shoulders looked like it would ease. Instead she redoubled her anger and stood up, slipping through the people to sit somewhere else in the car. He watched her go, and when he looked back at the guy next to him, perhaps to thank him, maybe to ask him if they really knew one another, the seat was empty.

He was gone.

His eyes scanned each person in the car to see if he’d gotten up and moved somewhere, but he was nowhere to be seen. They hadn’t stopped at a station.

Ryan’s stomach twisted in discomfort and he reached to rub at his mouth and jaw, fingers brushing over the stubble there, making his fingers tingle all over again. 

When the car came to a stop at the station, he grabbed the pole to pull himself up and out, the space suddenly far too cramped and far too hot. He stumbled put his back to the wall of the tunnel, watching people file in and out. The kid didn’t come out. He swallowed hard and jammed his hands in his pockets again, taking the stairs two at a time up to the street.


	2. Alleyway

“Mica, you’re worryin’ too much. I already took care of it,” Ray explained, picking at the chipping paint to reveal the shiny metal bar, painted with a sick green paint. He tilted his head to press the phone between his ear and shoulder, “No, I didn’t kill her, yeah I know I said I took care of it, but not like that.”

Sitting on the fire escape, Ray was a few minutes early. He could hear movement, not quite a scuffle, but enough that he could tell how it was coming along.

“We switched districts and I’ve been keeping an eye on her. She’s got no clue we swapped, and she’s just sort of- I mean she’s losing it, yeah- but Mica- Mica, come on.” Ray heaved a sigh, picking at more paint, “She’s shitty, okay? She’s a controlling prick. I mean, you’re- yeah she’s controlling!”

Rolling his eyes, he let her speak for a few moments, getting it all off her chest before he interjected again, “She tried to get you to quit your job, dude. She said you were, what was it? Right, she said you were better than that, like this is demeaning or some shit.”

The rustling in the alleyway three buildings up stopped and Ray paused, pulling the phone away from his ear for a moment. He cut Mica off mid sentence, “Sorry, gotta go. Text me later. Good luck with The Dynasty over there, they rake it in hard. You’ll be busy.”

Ray didn’t give her time to say more before he ended the call and pocketed his phone. He leaned forward on the fire escape as the man came around the corner, pushing its blade into the sheath under its shirt on its back.

The black mask shrouded its features, the skull and amusing caricature, but Ray’s eyes trailed the ripple of its aura, watching it as it walked closer, unaware Ray was sitting on high. It pulled it off in an easy motion, brown hair tied up into a messy bun only made messier by the mask, and it stuffed it into its jacket pocket.

Its heart was pounding, but already slowing, and the ripples were already evening out to serenity. The searing heat was cooling, like metal red hot to a shiny silver. That was impressive, honestly. The last time he’d seen it, it’d been fuzzy, like television static. And now? Now it was crystal clear and smooth, calmed by the kill.

When it came closer, clearly a man on a mission, probably to get home to send confirmation for payment of a successful hit, Ray cleared his throat.

It stopped dead in its tracks and its head snapped up to look at Ray sitting on the fire escape. The black slash of paint across its eyes to keep its skin uniform with its mask made him smile. Ray waved a hand, eyebrows high on his forehead as he called down, “How’s it goin?”

The man stood still, staring up at Ray before it glanced over its shoulder, then back up at Ray. It opened its mouth a sliver before it closed it, thinking better of its words, or taking more time to find the right ones.

With another smile, Ray hopped up, the metal frame creaking under him as he slid down the ladder, gloves chipping off old paint as he did, sprinkling the pavement with flecks of green. He turned back to it with a sharp laugh, “That good, huh?”

It shook its head, spitting out words quickly, as if it’d forgotten it hadn’t said them, “Who are you?”

Ray’s face scrunched up and he shook his head, “That’s a shitty first question, dude.” He patted himself down, his hoodie and pants pockets before he found a crushed and crumpled pack of cigarettes, “You can come up with something better than that.”

It looked offended then, looking Ray up and down before it tried again, “You were on the subway the other day. You told that lady off.”

Pulling out a cigarette, he pressed it between his lips and hummed and affirmative.

“You said we were friends.”

Ray pulled the lighter out and pushed the pack back into his pocket unceremoniously before he lifted a hand to shield the little flame from the wind pulling down the alleyway. Looking back up at it, an eyebrow arched, he spoke with tight lips around the cigarette, “Never heard of improv, dude?”

“Yeah, but…” it trailed off, glancing up the road. The aura around it shifted, rippling like fish nibbling at the surface for food, tiny plips of movement, but enough they knocked against each other before petering back out.

It looked back at Ray, its face more sure, “I don’t know you.”

Huffing a laugh with an exhale, a cloud of smoke leaving him in a rush, “Yeah?” Ray licked his lips, “So you don’t know what impov is?”

“I do-” it started quickly and Ray cut it off just as fast.

“I lied. She was being rude, I told her to fuck off in the nicest way without her getting pissier.” Ray shook his head, taking another drag from his smoke, “You do need to work on that staring thing though. Do you do that to everyone?”

Color tinged its cheeks suddenly, almost unseen under the facepaint, but its aura warmed, and Ray grinned, ducking his head to try to hide it. It was embarrassed and snapped back, “No. I was just… I was having an off day.”

“You know, they say, people who lose touch with reality are more likely to run into unreal shit,” Ray clicked his tongue, nodding at it.

It stared at Ray for a long moment, blue eyes brighter with the black contrast around its eyes. “Oooor I was dissociating because I’m mentally ill.”

It was Ray’s turn to stare at it, the cigarette burning away a little, all he could do was watch as its aura thickened, layer upon layer wrapping it up like a flower’s petals, like a blanket of snow in a blizzard, like six feet of dirt keeping a casket down. 

Ray pulled the cigarette from his lips, nodding once, “Or, y’know, that too I guess.”

“Who are you, then?” It asked, gesturing to Ray with a bare hand. He could see its bloodied gloves stuffed into its pocket. He wondered idly how often that jacket was dry cleaned for blood stains. It looked slippery smooth, so he doubted blood stuck around very long.

“Mm, there’s that question again,” Ray flicked his ashes. “I’m Ray.”

It looked a little offput by the answer, and Ray’s eyebrows rose. He didn’t say anything, and it just watched him for a long moment before it spoke up either. “That’s it?”

Barking a sudden laugh, Ray half turned away, stepping back before he composed himself, “That’s it? Yeah, that’s it. You asked me who I was! I’m Ray.”

“Am I supposed to know who you are?”

Another round of laughter, shaking him to his core, “God, I sure as fuck hope not.” For its sake more than Ray’s, honestly.

It looked annoyed, irritated. The aura’s petals and depth had faded, defenses falling away, but now it was sharp, edge like a razor blade gleaming in the sun. It stood just a little taller, fists clenched. A line in its jaw twitched. Ray took in each detail, watching how it moved, how it responded to each thing he said, and the way its aura shifted and moved in relation to what it displayed with its body.

“Then what’s the deal?” It pushed, turning its body to face Ray more.

“What do you mean, what’s the deal?”

“I mean, why did you… why did you…” It floundered suddenly, unsure of its words and what to say. It looked lost and Ray tilted his head to watch it, waiting for it to find its footing again.

Instead, he tried to supply something, “Why did I sit next to you on the subway? Why did I tell the lady off?”

It’s eyes focused on Ray’s face again and it nodded slowly, then more sure, “Yeah.”

Ray took another deep breath from his cigarette, “Well, there was an open seat and she was being rude.”

“That’s it?” it demanded, aura hot and sharp.

Shaking his head, Ray took on last drag before he flicked his smoke off into the gutter, blowing out the smoke from his lungs, “You sure do ask that a lot.”

Its arm twitched and Ray picked up a finger, pointing up at it, with it’s looming height and wide shoulders, it was still so fucking small, “The world don’t owe you shit, Ryan, remember that.”

He looked him up and down before he scoffed, having stunned it into silence, he turned around, shaking his head. Ray shoved his hands back in his pockets, fishing his phone out with one as he headed up the sidewalk. He pulled his phone back out to get back to his call with Mica, turning around to shuffle backwards up the incline.

It was still standing there, staring after him. Its aura flickered with an angry fire, the edges bright and wild. Ray gave a half hearted salute, calling back, “Have a good one!”

He pressed his phone to his ear and smiled when she picked up. He turned his back on the human and smiled into his phone, “Yo.”

“You called back quick!” she chirped in greeting.

“Yeah, it wasn’t that big a deal,” he paused, “It shouldn’t be that hard, anyway.”

“Are you sure about that?” Mica asked softly.

“It’s just a dumb human,” Ray rolled his eyes, tone turning mocking, “Oh, I’m shakin’ in my boots. Come on.”

She laughed, a sound that made his stomach twist, saccharine sweet and pacifying, “That’s what I thought too, Ray.”

He looked back over his shoulder and it was gone, having disappeared down the alleyway, Ray assumed. Humans could be brutal and ruthless and tricky, clever beasts, but they were far from a threat. Ray had nothing to worry about.


	3. 23rd and Myers, Apt. 102

_Re: babysitter needed (Los Santos)_   
_Posted: 23 minutes ago_

_looking for a babysitter for the night. going out tonight and my son will be alone._   
_23rd and myers. 102. we’ll talk payment when you get here._

Ryan’s thumb skirted over the letters of the hit, the Los Santos area craigslist posting were a popular place for people to put hits out if they knew the right words to use. And everyone who was anyone good at their job knew the specifics to pick apart which were jobs, and which were people just trying to live their lives.

23rd and Myers, apartment 102. He could do that.

The streets today weren’t covered in the same misty rain, but there was still a heavy feeling pushing on his shoulders. He couldn’t get that kid’s face out of his mind. He was probably nobody, just another kid trying to get by in a tough city, but he’d twisted something in Ryan’s core, something he couldn’t pinpoint. The kid wasn’t right. He’d said some shit, but nothing that Ryan could really pull apart as being malicious, and he’d replayed the words over and over a lot laying in bed staring at his ceiling.

He’d claimed he didn’t know him, and yet he’d referred to him by his name. Not even his alias or his first name, but the name he used with friends, with people he trusted to know his name.

Maybe it was all crazy talk. Instincts could be wrong a lot and Los Santos was dangerous for a reason. When everyone in it knew that, people tended to work cautiously, move with purpose. No one lingered, no one drew attention to themselves, and everyone knew how to get you, or get away. It’s why you had to be better, be quicker. He’d changed his locks and set up a new set of cameras just in case.

The broken lock on the back door, though, was the first red flag that Ryan hadn’t been fast enough.

Someone was already here.

Ryan pulled the knife from the holster on his back, gripping it tight as he pulled his mask on. If someone was already here, they were quick. It had only been posted half an hour ago, and it looked like they’d already done their job, even if it was sloppy. Who broke locks anymore? Savages.

Watching through the eyes of the mask, he crept into the bottom story of the duplex, keeping his ears sharp and his eyes peeled for any signs of a struggle, of the other killer, or maybe, of their target.

A broken plate on the floor in the kitchen. A chair knocked over and broken in the dining room. A picture knocked off the wall in the hall.

The killer had his back to Ryan when he stepped into the room. The target was a crumpled heap on the floor and the killer didn’t move from his position looming over the body. No blood. No slash marks. No bullet holes. But all the same, the man was dead, pale with lifeless eyes staring up at Ryan standing in the doorway.

The kid looked over his shoulder, smirking for Ryan before he nodded down to the body, “It’s pretty good work.”

Ryan stood stock still, watching the kid in the purple hoodie. He’d killed this guy. He was a hit man. That was why he made Ryan’s stomach twist, why his instincts told him to keep his distance. He was dangerous.

“Strangled,” he said, crouching down to push back the line of his shirt to show deep bruises in the shape of fingers along the dead man’s throat. “That’s really dumb though. You leave fingerprints and skin and shit if you don’t wear gloves. Sloppy.”

That’s what Ryan had been thinking too.

“Would you do better if you hadn’t dragged ass to get here, Ryan?”

Even hidden behind his mask, his eyes focused and his breath caught. His name again. No one knew his name. No one. Still crouched down, he just watched Ryan with that smirk on his lips. His world wavered and his grip on his knife shook.

“Were you gonna slit his throat or stab him? Right in between his ribs, nice and easy? You don’t really have a ton of options with that thing.” He paused, watching Ryan’s expressionless mask, and his stomach twisted to think the kid could see the rising panic in his eyes.

He stood up, seemingly taller than Ryan at first, looming over him like he had loomed over the body and Ryan took half a step back in response. He wasn’t taller, of course not, but god did it feel that way for a moment.

“Do you leave the body around? Do you toss it in a dumpster? Come on, Ryan, think. You’re gonna get caught if you don’t do it right.”

Ryan’s head swam and his world continued to pull at the edges, almost as if he were underwater. His chest was tight and he struggled to breathe through the thick mask. His mouth was dry and he felt the world tilting. He felt like he was going to be sick. The kid rolled his eyes, shaking his head and looked back down at the body.

He reached out quickly to steady himself and his glove brushed against the rough brick wall. Eyes trailed down his arm to his hand, to the brick wall, and to the alleyway he was standing in. Ryan turned, spun, and looked at himself and his surroundings. He was…

The lock on the back door wasn’t broken, and he stared up at the windows of the house. He could hear rustling inside, someone in the kitchen at the sink washing dishes. The sound stopped and moved off somewhere else, deeper into the house and even though he couldn’t quite piece together what had happened, he knew he had a job to do. He’d come out to do this, and he was getting it done.

The lock was easy, his fingers quick even with his gloves and when it clicked open, he turned the knob, pocketing the loose pieces of the kit so he didn’t have to waste time putting them away. He pulled his blade again, and lucky for him, the target was coming back to the kitchen when Ryan pushed the door open. He lunged, and catching the man off guard, gaining the ground on him.

The man dropped the plate he was holding and it shattered across the tile floor, scattering glass underfoot.

“Were you gonna slit his throat?”

The words came back to him, loud and crushing, deafening him with their intensity so suddenly. His blade pushed too far and too fast as his arm locked up. It sunk into the wood of the door jamb and the man tried to squirm by Ryan, frantic eyes locked on the back door still wide open. Leaving the knife, he turned to pin the man to the wall hard, his forearm pressing down on his throat.

He brought his knee up, catching Ryan hard in the gut, knocking the wind out of him for a moment, giving him enough time to push his arm away and double back down the hallway into the living room, hands skirting across the walls as he ran, pulling a picture off the wall.

Stepping over it, he darted after him, and when he went for the stairs, Ryan yanked him back down. He bounced his face off the stairs and scrambled for the railing, his nails pulled and two of them broke, blood smearing down his fingers when Ryan pinned him to the floor, cracking the back of his head against the wood.

“Strangled.”

Ryan’s face was twisted into a frustrated snarl behind his mask, the skull expressionless and oppressive, bearing down on the man as he kept him pinned. He was speaking, he was saying something, probably begging for his life, but Ryan’s head was swimming with the booming echoes of something he could have sworn he’d heard. Something he was sure he’d heard.

There was blood on his nose and his hands as he pushed and pulled at Ryan’s hands fisted in his shirt, but he couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see more than the target and the money. It was another life that had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He might have done something wrong, and maybe not, but someone had a lot of money and a temper.

Ryan wasn’t judge, he was executioner, and it was far from him to feel bad for doing his job.

His fist came down hard and he felt the crunch of his nose. The blood sprayed out across the wood floor and still the man fought. Ryan did it again, keeping him from getting away with his weight and his grip, and punch after punch, he felt more break, he felt more give way under his hand. Blood and worse was splashed up his sleeve and it soaked his glove, making his hand sticky, drying his fist closed. The target had stopped moving a while ago, and Ryan had kept at it. He beat the man’s face into an an unrecognizable pulp before the echoes of the kid’s words quieted.

When he pried his hand from the man’s shirt front, it ached with how hard he’d kept it clenched and when he pulled out one of the teeth imbedded in his glove, he tossed it to the floor with the others that had scattered with each punch.

Ryan could feel the ache of muscles pulled too tight, the way sweat was dripping down his back, how he was panting behind his mask. It was the adrenaline of the fight and the kill, of a job well done and a fight won to continue. He’d come out on top, sharper and faster and deadlier, and was walking away, living another day. He was good with that.

The back door squeaked and he turned his head quickly, snapping to attention, eyes sharp and fierce like some wild animal.

He was standing in the kitchen at the end of the hallway, looking at the carnage Ryan had wrought. The shattered plate, the knife in the door jamb. He had his hands pushed deep in his hoodie pockets as he came down the hall towards him and the life he’d taken.

He whistled, thick brows high and lips pursed with a nod, some kind of grudging respect. It was almost as if he were pleasantly surprised and impressed with what Ryan had done.

“Damn dude, nice work. I mean, real damn messy, but you sure did kill the shit out of him.”

Drawn tight as a bowstring, Ryan watched him, watched the way he stood so lax, so relaxed, as if this weren’t a crime scene, as if Ryan hadn’t beaten this man’s head in with his fist.

The rush of realization let the floodgates open and the pain coursed up his arm like a fire, the sensation burning all the way up into his neck. He pulled his hand up and close to his chest, even bloodied. He hadn’t broken anything, he’d been doing this too long for him to start breaking bones now, but it still hurt like a motherfucker. It shook all the way to his shoulder, but he could look at the damage later. He hadn’t even had brass knuckles on. Not his smartest move, but he’d gotten the job done.

“You missed the chair, and that sure as hell isn’t what it was before, but you still got the job done, so I mean, no sweat, right? You can go home and binge more Cupcake Wars for another week.”

Missed the chair? What did he mean?

Ryan stood, slowly and shakily, watching the kid looking at the body. He passed Ryan after he’d gotten out of the way and crouched next to the mess. He could hear him poking and prodding at it, the squelch of blood and meat, shifting the teeth on the floor. His words were soft, talking to himself more than Ryan, “Looks like hamburger.”

He clicked his tongue before he hummed, “You know if this was the right guy, Ryan? Is this the right side of the duplex?”

Looking back at him and the unrecognizable face, Ryan’s hair stood on end. A chill climbing up his spine. The mask muffled his words, “What?”

That shitty smirk was thrown over his shoulder and Ray nodded down at the body, one of the man’s teeth pinched between two of his fingers, “This is 101, not 102.”

Ice shot through Ryan’s gut and he pushed himself down the hall, dragging bloody prints in his wake. He grabbed his knife, almost as an afterthought, and pried it from the wall. It came away with splinters, and he’d have to sharpen it later. He looked back over his shoulder at the kid crouched down over the body and his stomach twisted again, pulling tight. His world tilted again, making him stumble out into the alleyway behind the house.

He had time enough to pull his mask over his head and take a deep gulp of fresh air before he vomited across the pavement. His hair stuck to him with sweat and his face paint ran into his eyes.

He didn’t look back into the house again.

Ryan ran home with nothing but the rush of his blood in his ears. He didn’t hear the startled people he pushed past or the cars honking when he cut them off and he definitely didn’t hear the distant sound of sirens. Sirens were normal in Los Santos.

With the door locked behind him, his bloodied jacket in the bottom of the tub in a heap, he cut his glove off with a pair of scissors to assessed the damage. Nothing was broken, but it was a mottled mess of black and purple all along his knuckles, and at the very least, he’d jammed his wrist. It was difficult to turn and bend, maybe a sprain.

He dug a bag of peas out of the freezer, wrapped it in a washcloth, and curled up on the corner of the couch to watch Cupcake Wars. He hadn’t photographed the body to prove the man was dead- if it had even been his target at all- and he didn’t care about the money. Not right now. He’d be able to keep his lights on another week just fine. He had time to heal up and go back at it later.

He was someone who had been doing this for so long, he’d been a killer for too many years. Why was it now, and only now, that he questioned whether or not he’d done his job properly? Echoes of a nonchalant tone throbbed like a creeping headache through his mind.

Ryan simply turned the television up a few more notches to drown it out.


	4. Abandoned Lot

“Tighter, come on, l-” a soft wheeze, “like you mean it.”

The grip tightened and made his throat creak with the pressure and Ray grinned a little, smile pulling at his lips as the darkness started to creep in on the edges of his vision. He shifted and squirmed, fighting back for the rush of adrenaline through his veins. The brick wall was solid at his back, putting him between a rock and a hard place, and he struggled to find any footing, his toes just barely scuffing the concrete, heels scraping the brick in a way that made his teeth ache.

He drew a breath and his mind screamed with instinctual panic. He couldn’t die, he knew that, but his shitty human form didn’t know that. And that was the point.

Footsteps running quickly outside the alleyway had him reeling back to himself, and Ray pulled himself back into himself, into something solid. Something comprehensible.

It came around the corner in a flurry and Ray couldn’t help but groan internally. Of fucking course it was that human.

It had come to a halt when it had spotted them, a few steps into the alley.

Ray knew how bad this must look.

The angel pinned him to the wall, him in his ratty hoodie and his worn jeans and his scuffed vans, his glasses askew and his face red from the unseen grip on his throat that kept him pinned to the wall. The same grip he pulled at, grasping at air, at something he couldn’t touch, couldn’t escape.

It was massive, filling the side street with it’s majesty.

A giant cog, each prong dotted with an eye, a thousand of them, and all alight with a different flame, each flame a different color. They turned second by second, ticking away time, ticking away moments in the cosmos.

The human just stood in awe, eyes wide and lips slightly parted. Its face was pale under the minimal face paint, the dark slashed across its eyes. It had been running. Ray could hear sirens. How had it gotten itself into trouble? It couldn’t have screwed up a job, it was good at its work.

The angel half turned to look at the human, hands forming around Ray’s throat as it rippled like heat on tarmac. It tried to find a form the human wouldn’t fear, tried to pull itself back into something comprehensible, something unassuming. It wasn’t working so well, and just succeeded to make it look worse as arms sprouted all around the wheel, each just barely unsettling with six fingers. The fires died down and then flared brighter as it struggled to hide itself and when it looked at the human, the small creature jolted as if shocked, freezing as it stared down the alley at it. 

It’s aura was small and tight, close to its body with a murmur running through it as it tried to stave off panic and make itself small in the face of such incredible horror. All it managed was a soft, “Shit.”

The press on Ray’s throat was still solid and crushing, but the way the gear that made up the angel’s maid body had started to tick faster, had started to count down moments faster, it made his heart lurch. That couldn’t be good. He turned his head against the brick wall, croaking out, “Run!”

The human stood frozen for a moment before it looked up at Ray instead, eyes wide, pupils pinpricks in it’s panic. When it locked eyes with Ray, it’s aura blew out to it’s normal size, razor sharp and blinding white and without much more hesitation, it took off back out of the alleyway and up the road. Ray still didn’t know why it had been running, or from what, whether it had been the sirens or something else, but he knew he had to go catch it after this.

Turning back to him, all the eyes of the angel focused on Ray now. His lips pulled back from his teeth, too big and too sharp to belong to his human vessel. With no humans around, he didn’t need to be so conscious of his appearance and could relax his hold on reality. Its arms faded away, the hands around his throat disappearing with a fizzle of energy. The pressure stayed, even clamped tighter, but Ray could see some of its eyes drift down towards the alleyway as it watched for others, as it watched for the one who had seen.

With a soft grunt, Ray pushed.

He pushed himself outwards, enveloping the angel with his being, with his weight. Hot prickles of fire and the even hotter slivers of ice wrapping around the creature, the pressure mounting as he pushed it back and down. Ray wrapped it up and with an easy movement, crushed it like a piece of tin foil. It shrieked an awful sound, melodic and yet warbling with fear and desperation, crunching and grinding as it folded in on itself under Ray’s power. He pushed and pushed and pushed and as he did, it stopped screaming, its body simply compacting farther, the shiny golden metal of its body a twisted ball of broken prongs. Only a few of its eyes stared up at him, the others gone in a puff of rainbow embers, and he stared into them as he finished the job with a sickening pop.

The angel’s grace hung in the air like a silk scarf, thin and wispy, shimmering like mercury. Ray plucked it out of the air, twisting it around his hand to pull it in. He slurped it up like some weird celestial spaghetti, shuddering as the last of it disappeared past his teeth, goosebumps prickling over what skin was left on his own visage.

With eyes alight with the fires of the creature he’d snuffed out, never the same color, flickering like it’s dying embers, Ray turned and left the alley. Each step was a little closer to a manageable form, and when he rounded out into the street, he was in his hoodie and vans again, hands jammed into his pockets.

The thrill of the kill had distracted him for a moment and when he remembered the human, he muttered quietly, “Shit,” before darting off up the street in search of it. It couldn’t hide from him, but he had to catch up to it first.

The sirens were louder now and the sound of gunfire was like music to his ears. Ray followed it a few blocks up to find a small squad hiding behind their cars as they shot across a parking lot at someone else behind another car. The lone car was already riddled with bullets, a few peppered into the police cars.

He watched for a moment or two before he saw the human’s head pop up to level its gun and with a steady shot and commendable aim, one of the policemen's heads exploded backwards in a spray of gore. It pulled on him, tugged at his center, at his core, but he pushed back, trying to focus. It was bright and sweet but Ray rushed in the clamor to skirt in around the other side of the car, pressing his back to the door. The human turned on him with a snarl on its lips, gun ready. It was lucky it hadn’t shot Ray.

Its aura was cool and smooth, something Ray understood as calm and centered, probably its ease and professionalism in its work and Ray was impressed to see it so relaxed in the middle of a firefight.

He smiled, eyebrows raising as he looked up at it, “Hey dude, how’s it going? You uh, you look a little preoccupied.” Ray shrugged a shoulder, gesturing to the police still trying to shoot this human through the window.

It was lucky that most people in the city with money were too paranoid not to reinforce their vehicles, or it would have been dead much sooner. Either from a bullet ripping through the metal, or from it piercing the tank. It looked Ray up and down, both hands on its pistol as it glanced back out at the cops before huffing out, “W-what- no, I don’t-”

Cutting itself off, it shook its head. Ray tilted his own head, “Cat got your tongue? You’re not busy, are you? I was, yknow, wondering if you wanted to get lunch?”

Turning back to look at him quickly, Ray was genuinely surprised to see it didn’t look down at him with any anger, any venom. It looked… giddy. It made something warm spark in Ray’s core as he stared back. It grinned and he couldn’t help but grin back, even if the human’s grin was a little manic. Something in the back of his mind shifted, almost as though his fight or flight reflexes were struggling against one another. There was never a reason he’d need to run, it wasn’t as though he was ever really in danger, but in that moment, looking up at the human, at Ryan’s smile, the instinct to run was rushing through his body, burning him up with its urgency.

“Are you asking me out on a date while we’re being shot at?”

The last time Ray had seen this human before today, he’d warped its mind, he’d played with it in a way he shouldn’t have. And here it was, smiling down at him thinking he was making a pass at it. Maybe he was. Ray had asked it to lunch as a casual conversation starter to try to throw it off it’s game, sneakily distract it in the pressure of the firefight. And it was happy about it? Even after all that Ray had done to it? The subway, the alleyway, the job?

It was taking it all in stride and was quipping back at him.

Maybe Mica was right. Maybe this was dangerous.

It leaned over the car and popped another cop in the head before it ducked down. Ray could see a bead of sweat roll down the side of its face and knew that it wasn’t happy. It was defensively manic. It was in the zone, focused on fighting. It was quipping back at Ray, not thinking about what he’d done to it. It was too focused on staving off death to let itself be distracted. Ray was right that it was good at its job.

Peeking up over the vehicle, a bullet pinged off the top of the hood, zipping between them. Ray’s brows rose as he too peeked over the car to look through the slightly tinted windows at the police force dwindling. He could hear a chopper far off and more sirens on their way.

“What did you even do, dude? Jesus,” Ray asked, not turning to look at the human, at Ryan.

“Well, when you’re a wanted criminal with a kill count in the hundreds, wrong place, wrong time, this happens.” It glanced over at him with another smile, showing its teeth in a wide display, “Typical Tuesday.”

“How are you gettin’ out of this one, Ryan?” Ray pressed, keeping one eye on the police, and the threat of reinforcements growing louder.

The human didn’t answer him, and instead sat with its back to the car, panting quietly. It was sorting it out for itself too, not sure. Ray could see it’s eyes darting to and fro and it searched for answers. Its mask was nowhere to be seen, it couldn’t hide behind it, and Ray wondered if that helped fuel the manic nature. It turned to look at him then, jaw set. He dug around in his coat pocket until he found a grenade, and Ray watched as Ryan’s aura shifted from a small defensive bubble, a few inches from his body, like a cloak, to crushingly tight, like armor.

The human pulled the pin and let it cook in his hand before he lobbed it over the car they were crouched behind, and with aim Ray couldn’t attribute to anything but muscle memory and practiced ease, it landed in front of the cop car and rolled under it.

And then Ryan made a run for it.

Darting out from the car, and off to the left, it rolled its way down under the cover of another car, one closer to an alleyway it could slip out. Just as Ryan had its back to the car, safe at a farther distance, the grenade exploded. Ray was still settled behind the first car, closer to the police cruiser, but he didn’t fear being hurt. All at once the parking lot was a cacophony of chaos, the grenade and then the car exploding, knocking back and killing a handful of the police with the sheer impact, the shrapnel, and the fire. Spattered with gasoline that ignited, trying to extinguish it with limbs that weren’t torn up from metal, Ryan had done the right thing to get itself out of trouble.

The damage the car had done had punctured the frame of the car Ray had been hiding under, and he could smell it leaking gas now too, the windows exploded out of it, two of the tires popped.

Ray stood up, knowing himself not to be in danger, even if there were aggressive stragglers, but he realized his mistake a moment later when, seeing Ray stand, Ryan saw it as a cue that the cost was clear.

After everything, watching Ryan slump to the ground in a heap from a bullet, a single bullet, was a little unnerving, even for him. Some ballsy rookie thought would think itself a hero for taking out their guy, even after a heavy blow.

Ryan was lying facedown on the pavement, blood pooling under him and Ray watched as the human’s aura fizzled out, watched it dissipate completely from his body in wisps and curls into nothingness.

Ray sighed, shoulders slumping in annoyance, “Well shit…”


	5. Morgue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally October, which means bring on the spoop!
> 
> This chapter is kind of heavy on the gore and the unreality, fair warning.

Ryan wasn’t sure what he thought dying might have been like and after having been killed, he couldn’t remember what he must have thought, either. It was a lot more nothingness than he thought though. He was raised a good Christian boy in Georgia and while he might have ended up jaded, warped by the world and it’s people, he still saw the black and whites of Heaven and Hell in his mind’s eye when he thought about his death.

This was far from that.

Void wasn’t quite the word for it, and nothingness fit, but not quite. There weren’t words Ryan knew to describe it. He felt like he was floating, and all the same, like he was being squashed and pushed down, pushed in towards his center by an incredible force. Almost as though it were trying to make him collapse in on himself or if he dared exhale, he’d float away to pieces.

He then realized he was holding his breath, or, he must have been for such a crushing feeling. But he didn’t dare exhale either, the tingling in his extremities like they were fading away was too strong to risk it. He couldn’t see himself, not his feet or his hands, or when he crossed his vision, the nose on his face.

Ryan wondered idly if it might be he was blind, but it wasn’t dark. It wasn’t bright either, simply more he didn’t have words for. Which made him wonder if he might have a concussion, with this much confusion and lack of any way to describe his surroundings, he feared for brain damage.

He supposed brain damage didn’t matter much now that he was dead.

Was he dead? Maybe he was in a coma! He’d heard the explosion of the car, and the kid, Ray, he’d-

He couldn’t remember.

Ryan remembered Ray. That was his name. He’d told him the evening in the alleyway, after the night on the subway. He’d lost the name when… when he’d lost track of time, lost track of self the night of the hit. But he remembered when he saw him in the alley, and when the kid, when Ray had joined him in the shoot out with the police. He hadn’t even had a gun. What had he even been doing?

And that THING?

Trying to recall what he’d seen attacking the lad in that alley made the feeling of fading and being crushed inward increase tenfold. He felt himself shatter from the core at the same time he felt every part of him fold in on itself until he felt small as a mouse, helpless as one too. It had seen him, it had seen all of him. His body and his mind and his sins, and he’d felt so cosmically small compared. And it had been pinning Ray to the wall. And then- somehow the kid had gotten away from it?

The feeling of being crushed and pulled apart spiked again and he struggled not to gasp against the sudden sensation. He tried not to think about it, because it seemed too much worry about things he couldn’t quite comprehend was only making the feeling worsen. But it didn’t back down, the pressure and the stretch, the fading feeling and the feeling of being crushed, it ramped up more and more, his body, or lack of, screaming in protest as the sensation taxed his body.

Ryan felt like his bones ignite, fire coursing through him. He felt sharp crystals of ice in his lungs and his eyes, the chill creeping through his chest, breath still held as the reflexive tears streaked trails of ice down his cheeks. He grit his teeth until he could feel them crack, pulling, clawing at the air, at his body, at anything he could reach, which of course, was nothing at all.

He gave in then, the conflicting sensations and pains were too much to fight, and he screamed. His lungs filled with air and he screamed, the burning stretching up his throat, burning up into his skull.

Reality snapped suddenly, he could see, he could hear, he was alive, and holy fuck did it hurt. But the pain of reality was so much less than the burning through every fiber of himself it had been before. Even the rush of chill at its heels was gone. His eyes were wide and open and he was staring up at the diener with the scalpel in his throat, cutting into him with a grisly crunch.

Ryan laid stock still, holding his breath despite the fact this man was slicing into the inner workings of his throat and he could feel it. He took stock of himself and moved quickly, reaching out to push the man back, push him away from where Ryan was laid out on the table, and he rolled to follow after him. The scalpel clattered to the floor and the man fell to his ass on the floor with wide eyes and a gaping mouth, too scared to even scream, and Ryan followed him to press his forearm to his throat.

His intestines all kind of sloshed out of his chest cavity in a rush and pooled in the man’s lap. Ryan looked down at himself and huffed quietly, “Fuckin’-” His voice was choppy and cracked, but he did what he could to move despite the need for answers in his own mind deafening him, and the way his insides were very suddenly his outsides. (The tug of gravity on his organs didn’t feel particularly nice, if he was honest.)

He scooped up his intestines to try to push them back up inside his belly, trying to use the flaps of flesh that had once been his chest and stomach to keep them inside. In his chest his lungs inflated and deflated with each breath and his heart beat quickly as adrenaline rushed through his veins.

Ryan realized belatedly that he didn’t have the front part of his chest cavity or his ribs. Where had those gotten off to?

When he looked back down at the man, he was unconscious, probably passed out from fear. Poor dude. At least it’d be a good story to tell.

The door opened and his head snapped up, fingers closing around the lost scalpel on the floor, his spine bristling with the need to defend himself.

Ray stepped into the room almost casually before he stopped short, looking down at the diener and Ryan with his guts showing. He blinked a few times, tutting, “Got started without me?”

Ryan stood up slowly, keeping one hand on his lower belly to keep his intestines in before he huffed out, “You did this.”

Cringing a little, though the expression was obvious in its insincerity, Ray rubbed the back of his own neck, “That obvious, huh?”

“I died and you brought me back to life.” Another statement, no questions.

“Right again, another right answer and it’s straight to jail without passing Go, dude.”

“This isn’t Monopoly. I need my ribs.”

“I meeaan,” Ray trailed off, stepping around him to glance around the room, “Probably not, but if you want ‘em.”

Ryan turned to see him pointing to the still bloody bones set on the exam table, the harsh reality of them rough. They weren’t the stark white of movies, but rather still bloody, dark where it had dried. He picked them up with a bare hand, looking down at himself. This is where those went, but he couldn’t exactly just slap them back on. They weren’t Legos!

He looked back up at Ray, brows pressed tight and he sighed, stepping closer, gesturing, “Well, go on. Hold ‘em up there.”

He turned them to press them to his chest cavity. He could feel the scrape of the bones against each other, the rough edges where they’d been cut with the saw was a sensation and a sound that made his teeth ache.

Ray’s fingers hovered over the exposed bones for a moment before he pressed against them, eyes flicking up to Ryan’s face to make sure he was alright as he seemingly, organically, welded his bones back together. Ryan’s day was nothing but pain, he was sure. He could feel it in his bones, quite literally, and then the flourish of sensation when things were reconnected, when he could feel more of himself than had been there just before. Each hot line of welding was a spark of pain, like a beacon, as Ray attached each bone individually back to the rest of his skeleton.

The kid’s eyes were alight with a fire as he worked, and when he was done, there was a shine of sweat clinging to his brow. He didn’t acknowledge it, and Ryan himself was panting hard from the pain echoing through his body. He was ready not to be in pain for a while.

He’d held the flaps of skin to keep his intestines in, and turned and kept his arms out of the way while Ray had reattached his ribcage, but when that was settled, he was still gaping, all of his organs exposed, even behind his ribs. He pressed his skin flat, trying to slot the layers together nicely and find a suture himself closed. He could do that at least.

Ray huffed an annoyed sound and pressed his hand to his stomach, dragging fingers up the line of his cut apart flesh. He clamped a hand over Ryan’s mouth as he started to scream, cutting him off before he could make too much noise and alert someone. It was messy and quick, unlike the work on his bones, and it burned. He could SMELL the burning flesh, and the feeling of fire didn’t leave his skin as Ray cauterized the wound closed with his fingers.

It left a nasty red burn in it’s wake, one Ryan knew would scar, but when Ray had finally closed the join of the Y in his sternum, the kid let go a breath Ryan didn’t realize he’d been holding. He was sweatier now, a few droplets rolling down his jaw.

He croaked past the ragged treatment his throat had taken from the scalpel to him screaming behind Ray’s hand- and his own when he’d realized- when he asked, “Are… you alright?”

“No. Can we go?”

Ryan’s brows knit again and he realized belatedly, he was naked. He’d been naked the whole time. Ray realized in the same moment, eyes flicking down at Ryan’s groin, then back up, lips pressed into a tight line, “Your clothes should still be in a bag around here somewhere. Check the other tables, I’m gonna check the coast is clear.”

Nodding in return, Ryan shimmied himself around the slab he’d been dead on, picking through bags until he found where his clothes had been put. He was grateful to find them all intact. It hadn’t been an emergency, so they’d been careful to remove his clothing, no doubt needing it for further investigation later. He pulled on clothing quickly, tying his hair back into the familiar ponytail, he found the hole where the bullet had killed him. His fingers slid along the hole in his skull before he focused on his hair, shaking it off. He couldn’t dwell on that right now. Not now.

After tugging his clothes on and going through all of his things, he was happy to find that not only was his mask in among his possessions, but so were his phone, now dead, and his wallet, with everything intact. Again, they no doubt wanted to keep everything in place for evidence later, probably only one of them working tonight, despite his infamous nature. He was glad for places like this being understaffed.

He patted himself down before he turned back to Ray, smiling, “We’re good.”

Rolling his eyes with a small smile, Ray shook his head, “About time, dude.”

“So-rry, being not dead takes a minute,” Ryan quipped back, leaning in against him to peek out the door and down the hall, “How’s it look?”

Ray looked up at him from below where he was being squished against the door a little, “The receptionist’s out cold, knocked her out when I came in, and you scared this piss out of the coroner, so…”

He slipped out into the hall, jamming hands into his pockets before half turning back to Ryan, “Comin’ or not?”

Keeping his voice low out of reflex in an unfamiliar building, “Are we gonna talk about what just happened?”

Ray paused, looking back at him fully, “Now?”

Ryan ducked his head, huffing, “Now? Later? Eventually? I don’t know, sometime!”

“What’s there to know?”

“I just came back from the dead, Ray! Thanks to some kid who’s been real damn shady and hanging around a lot.”

Ray’s lips pursed and his eyes squinted as he rubbed his chin for a moment, drawing it out. He nodded, shrugging, “Yeah, sounds about right. You got it. Nothing to talk about.” Turning back around to walk down the hall he called back quietly, “You smoke?”

Ryan glanced back at the still unconscious diener on the floor and was caught between feeling bad for the dude, or hoping he took the opportunity and ran with it. He’d been doing the autopsy on The Vagabond, who then came back to life and fled. He could get a lot of ass with a story like that, if anyone believed him, that was.

He darted out after Ray, coming up behind him, “Do I smoke?”

“Yeah,” Ray pressed, his tone clearly questioning Ryan’s intelligence, “Cigarettes, weed, the hard shit?”

“Well, cigarettes, weed sometimes, and, yknow…” It was his turn to shrug, “You get up to shit in a city like this. Why?”

Ray pushed the back door open out into the night air, sighing a long drawn out sound, “Because I need to get blazed, pronto.”


	6. Rooftop

Ray could feel Ryan’s eyes on him, though he wasn’t staring him down. He was watching the way his hands moved through the familiar motions of preparing himself a pipe. It was detail work, but something he wasn’t new to. He could do this shit in his sleep, honestly. (If he slept.)

He was starting with pulling seeds and stems.

The two of them were settled at the top of a high rise, the concrete to their backs as the city moved on far below them. Up here it was relatively quiet, the sounds of the city faint, the breeze fresher.

“So are you gonna ask?” Ray started, not looking up from his work.

“Didn’t know when’d be appropriate,” Ryan answered immediately, and his quick response had Ray’s eyes flick up at him.

Him.

Ray wasn’t sure when he’d started considering him more than an ‘it’, more than a thing, or a tool, or some lesser being, but somewhere along the way, during the time he’d known this human, he’d stopped seeing him as something underneath Ray. He looked up from his work fully, hands stilling, and the fact that he’d stopped brought Ryan’s eyes up from his hands.

“Tell me what you think is up,” Ray offered, “And I’ll fill in the blanks.”

Ryan shifted, drawing a long breath to sigh it out slowly, “So, you brought me back from the dead. Obviously, since you’ve been hanging around when shit gets weird. There was the loss of time or whatever happened the night with my hit. And the thing in the alley. And the lady in the subway, I still don’t know if she was real or not.”

Pushing his hands up into his hair, he pulled his ponytail out to shake his hair loose, running his hands through it, agitated by something, clearly. Ray watched his fingers brush over the bullet hole in his skull and pause before he let his hands land heavy in his lap. Instead of dwelling, he continued.

“I don’t know how you did it, but I like to think I’ve got a pretty open mind.” He licked over his lips, turning his hands over to look at them, “This doesn’t feel like a second chance.”

Ray shrugged a shoulder, having gone back to his work, “It’s not, really. It’s me fixing shit that shouldn’t have happened. You weren’t meant to die yesterday, and you did. Mostly because I can’t leave well alone, but who’s counting?”

“You killed me?”

Brows pressed tight, Ray looked back up, “What? No. You were shot in the head by some rookie looking for a handjob from his superior officer,” he stuck a stem in his mouth to chew on it, “But if I hadn’t been there to distract you, you would have gotten out fine thanks to that real nice grenade toss, which, by the way, real nice.”

A hint of pink lit Ryan’s cheeks, even in the dark Ray could see it, his eyes far better than Ryan’s. His face was clear of paint, washed away before his autopsy hours ago. The human ducked his head, huffing a laugh, “It was pretty good, huh?”

“Mhm,” Ray hummed, “But you weren’t meant to die, so I fixed what was my fault and brought you back.”

There was a long pause as Ryan thought, and it gave Ray time to look at him. Since his death, his aura had not returned, and Ray wondered if it ever would. There were so few people’s auras that were as distinct and as flexible as Ryan’s, but there were even fewer without auras. Himself, his friend Mica, and a handful of other beings were without. It was likely his fault Ryan no longer had one, but it was fascinating nonetheless. It was more difficult for Ray to discern Ryan’s emotions this way.

“Do you know when I’m going to die?”

Something twisted in Ray, and he looked up at Ryan, watching his sharp blue eyes in the dark, his pupils blown to accommodate his shitty human vision. He looked tired despite it, the bags under his eyes darker for having been dead and the stress on his body and his mind from coming back from the dead, and his hair was loose and in his face as he watched Ray work. He flicked seeds out across the sparse gravel of the rooftop as he thought about the question and how best to answer it.

“If you wanted to, I guess anytime, sure, but otherwise…”

Ray dropped the cleaned buds into the grinder, brown with a little crown pressed into the wood, twisting it with a few good cranks of his wrist. He pulled the weed from the grinder, packing it into the bowl of the pipe before he looked Ryan over again.

“I was actually thinkin’ about you helping me out with some things.”

His gaze was a heavy feeling as Ray flicked the lighter, pressing it to the bud to light it, drawing a heavy breath from the pipe before he handed it over. Ryan took it, looking it over, metallic and purple. He watched Ray with a wary eye, still holding the pipe, “So, you brought me back from the dead somehow, because you wanna hire me?”

“Eeeeh, hire’s not a great word for it,” Ray drew it out, lips pursed. “I want you to work WITH me. Not FOR me.”

Ryan pressed it to his lips to draw a hit from the still lit bowl, passing it back as he held it in, chest puffed out with the big inhale. When he let it out, it was with a couple of coughs, clearly not as used to it as Ray was and he couldn’t help laugh at him a little for it. Ryan only smiled back in return, clearly finding amusement in his own inadequacy with this sort of thing too.

“I guess that’d depend on what you want me to help you with, and on the condition that you tell me how you brought me back to life.”

Eyebrows high, Ray coughed a laugh, flicking the wheel on his lighter a few times, “You think I’m gonna share trade secrets like that?”

The grin he received, even in the dark, was big and predatory, and it made Ray’s blood sing. He stared, in a quiet awe at this human. This fascinating and incredible human that could display such a range, from the days Ray had seen him misaligned and out of his own body, to the days he’d seen him killing, and the ease he found in the act. He could grin and pout and look downright horrified. His laugh was like silk, and his voice was enough to rock Ray to the core.

Mica had been right. Ryan was dangerous.

Of the two of them, it was a surprise.

“You will if you want my help, huh?”

Ryan reached to pluck the pipe out of Ray’s fingers, pulling his own lighter out of his pocket to take a hit while Ray was watching him, unmoving. He barked a laugh at the audacity, really. He’d just stolen it right out of his hand! He swiped it back and Ryan laughed in return, his hit held for just a short time before Ray had him laughing and exhaling in a little puff.

“I tell you, and you help me. Deal?”

Ryan looked him over, and he could feel those sharp eyes roam him, enough his guise prickled. Ray offered his hand to shake, keeping his pipe in the other, pulled back near his shoulder defensively so Ryan couldn’t swipe it from him again. His hand stayed there for a long moment while Ryan weighed his pros and cons, no doubt trying to think of all the encounters he’d had with Ray thus far.

When his warm hand clasped into Ray’s, it felt like a jolt of electricity surging up his arm. He withdrew his hand, flicking the wheel on the lighter again.

“I’m a reaper.”

He lit the pipe again, drawing a hit and exhausting the bud before he tapped it out on the concrete wall behind them, dusting the embers off into the air, streaking the concrete with ash.

“I come kill people when it’s their time to go, collect the soul, send it off to the Jury to be judged. Rinse and repeat.”

“Like, Heaven or Hell type judgement?” Ryan pressed, his hands wringing in his lap.

“I guess, yeah. Nothing is an option, Purgatory, I guess. And I mean, like there’s levels of Hell, there’s levels of Heaven too, harder to get into the higher tiers in Heaven than it is Hell. Even the saints were assholes. Mother Theresa was kind of a huge cunt,” Ray huffed a laugh, “But the lower levels are still comfortable and nice, whereas the closer levels in Hell are uncomfortable but manageable. Annoying more than punishing. Dante wasn’t too far off, he just cranked it up to twenty, yknow?”

“So the devil and God are real?”

Ray drew a long strained sound, face scrunched, “Eeeeh? I don’t know, man. I work for the Jury and people higher up or- ha, lower down I guess, they’re not my business so I don’t get nosy. Maybe? Probably depends on you more than them.” He shrugged heavy, setting his pipe and weed aside to relax against the wall and let the edges of the high sink into him before he went back for seconds.

Ryan was quiet next to him, and he couldn’t help but turn his head, beanie pulling on the rough concrete as he looked over at the human settled next to him. Ryan looked deep in concentration, thinking on something, wrapped up in emotions that Ray couldn’t quite parse anymore, his aura having dissipated with his initial death. Ray tilted his head to try to look at him past the curtain of hair half obscuring his face in the dark but he looked up at Ray instead.

“And you’re like, some grim reaper with the bones and the scythe?”

Barking a quick laugh, Ray shook his head, “I love that shit, dude. But again, not how it works, not really. Scythes are cool as fuck and a lot of us use them because you reap with them, or people used to- maybe still do? Harvest stuff with them. Classic. Some of us just stick to a good ol’ carving knife, pry that sucker out of there.”

“Which do you use?”

Man, Ryan sure was full of questions. But Ray guessed it made sense considering, and the dude was smart to get as much out of Ray as he could. He’d already agreed to help him, though the human didn’t even know with WHAT rightly. Ray felt a little bad having conned him into helping in exchange for answers, but if Ryan was going to agree, it’s not like Ray forced his hand.

“I like the carving knife, myself.”

“Can… I see it?”

Ray turned his head to look Ryan over, and it seemed like he was serious. He watched him closely for a long moment before he asked, “You wanna see the thing I use to harvest souls?”

A quick curt nod, and when Ray didn’t move, Ryan elaborated for him, “Not sayin’ I don’t believe you, but the more proof you’ve got backing up what you’re saying, the easier this is gonna be for the both of us.”

Thinking on what he said, Ray knew he was right. It was in the same vein as him asking so many questions. Wanting to see the blade wasn’t that out of line, especially since he had kind of gotten the dude killed and was asking for his help. Ray licked over his lips before he shifted, pulling his bag around to dig around in it. He pushed his arm into it, all the way to the elbow, fingers brushing this and that, a myriad of items in the spatial hole guised to look like a backpack. When his fingers found the handle, warmth rushed up his arm and he closed his fingers around it, pulling it up and up and up out of the bag.

“Mary Poppins over here, huh?” Ryan commented with a little grin that made Ray grin in return.

The blade was like oil, dark, but shimmering with every color of the rainbow, thought mostly streaks of purple and blue as he turned it over in his hands. Ten inches from the end of the blade to the tip, fourteen with the handle. Ray’s eyes on it didn’t catch Ryan’s reaching hand until the human had brushed his fingers over the edge of the blade.

He gasped a heavy, pained sound, though there was no blood and Ray drew it back quickly, his core lurching. There was a snarl on his lips and he could feel his guise slip around the edges with a sudden rush of panic.

Ryan stared at him with wide eyes and he pulled it back in, “Are you fucking STUPID, dude?!” Ray shoved it back into his bag unceremoniously with a huff, “Idiot.”

Eyes snapping back up to look at Ryan, he snatched his hand up, turning it over to look at his fingers. The tips were grey and wrinkled, as though he’d been in the water for a long time. Ryan watched Ray, eyes never moving from his face to regard his hand.

“What are you thinking? Oh, I’m just gonna reach out and touch this blade that sucks up souls. Genius plan.”

“I still have a soul?” Ryan asked in a hushed tone.

Brows pressing close, Ray looked up at him, “Yeah? I put it back, don’t you remember? You died, and I scooped up your soul, kept it with me for a while and- and then I put it back and here you are. And now you’re touching on the soul sucker like it’s- not smart, that wasn’t smart.” Ray huffed an annoyed sigh, letting his hand go.

“What’s going to happen?” He asked, finally turning his hand over to look at it.

“You’re missing a sliver of your soul now. I didn’t cut it out earlier, I-I moved it, me. It wasn’t easy. But this thing, this sucks it up and keeps it in there til I give it to the Jury and-”

“Are my fingers always gonna look like that?”

Ray stopped when Ryan interrupted him, the human’s voice surprisingly calm for having a part of his soul taken. Taken in such a way he would never be getting it back. Ray’s core was still lurching at the thought, his mind a cacophony.

“I… I don’t know, man. When I take souls I take the whole thing. Hope not though, you look like you’ve been fingering a Grey for a few hours.” He paused when Ryan looked confused, “That aliens, dude. They’re all grey and pruny. Like your fingers.”

“Aliens aren’t real, Ray.”

Deadpanned and unimpressed with his argument, “A week ago, did you think reapers were real?”

That made him give pause, and instead of answering, he looked back down at his fingers, tucking them away in his pocket instead. Ray hoped for Ryan’s sake the color came back at least. Even if the color loss was only to just past the first knuckle, and only on the first three fingers, it was kind of unsettling.

“So uh… what did you want me to help you with?” Ryan asked finally.

Instead of tiptoeing around the issue, instead of drawing it out, Ray looked him up and down and said simply, “I want you to help me reap.”

Looking up at him now, those sharp blue eyes scanning over every detail of Ray’s face before finally settling on his dark black eyes, Ryan blinked slowly, gaze flicking away to look out over the city.

“Sure.”

Tilting his head in, Ray hummed, a soft smile tugging at his lips, “Sure?”

Ryan shrugged a shoulder, “You’re letting me live, brought me back from the dead, and all you’re asking is for me to keep doing what I’ve been doing and killing?” He looked back at Ray with a crooked grin, “Seems like a pretty sweet deal to me.”


	7. Subway (Revisited)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for the support so far! Comments and kudos are like a life source haha. Feel free to hit up my tumblr, [pastelprinceling](http://pastelprinceling.tumblr.com/), as well, to see some good content about this AU and anything upcoming!

Ryan was better at this reaping thing than he thought he’d be, honestly. Not that he thought he’d be bad at it. He’d always been pretty damn good at killing, and this wasn’t much different. Someone needed to die, and he and Ray were going to go and collect. Sometimes they did it themselves, sometimes they just went to collect. Sometimes it was gang members caught in the crossfire. Sometimes it was little old ladies in rocking chairs. Sometimes it was little kids who’d been hit by cars. None of them were the same, and every single soul that Ryan watched Ray pull from someone was another life, and another story that was coming to a close.

It was kind of bittersweet work in a way, sometimes. With the old people and the little kids. Having lived long, full lives, or having been cut down long before their prime. Ryan knew it was only fair, and that people were born all the time, sometimes people had to die too.

Being so close to all the death though, it ended up bringing more heat to Ryan’s name. He did his work, because at the end of the day, the people he was hired to kill were going to end up dead, as was the plan all along, and it was just easier for them to collect on those hits. But those kills on top of whispers of being seen at nearly every other crime scene in the city, it ended up with more eyes out looking for him.

He’d noticed a long time ago that Ray went unnoticed in most places, small and thin, never making eye contact with people. He was a scruffy little young man smoking cigarettes on the corner. He wasn’t dangerous. Ryan was tall and broad shouldered and wore a lot of dark colors. The skull mask didn’t do him any favors either. He was imposing where Ray wasn’t, and with a reputation already on his head in certain circles and with the LSPD, more civilian whispers of seeing a man with a face like a charred skull at the scenes of car accidents and people who’d jumped from bridges, it all meant he ended up dead a whole hell of a lot more than usual. Usual being never. Or, never before Ray, at least.

Since he’d started working with Ray, Ryan had died quite a few times, and each time was just as unpleasant as the last. After each death he always found himself thinking in a quiet moment that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, that it hadn’t been as painful, and that the time spent in limbo without his soul wasn’t as bad as the time before it. But without fail each time it happened it was just as bad as before, and the disillusionment of what had happened afterwards was always thick as a wool pulled over his eyes. It didn’t get better.

Ryan supposed he was glad he was used to not feeling like himself, not being part of his own body, or simply being in pain. Working with Ray only tripled that.

But working alongside Ray wasn’t all bad. In reality, very little of it was actually bad. There were a lot of times where things were good. Very good. He and Ray had gotten in thick as thieves, and gotten to know each other rather intimately. It had been rocky in the few months they’d been working together, but it was worth it.

The feeling of Ray’s lips on his wounds after his resurrections were something he wouldn’t give for the world. Not in this life or the next, or even ten lives down the road.

From each and every bullet hole, to the slices shrapnel left, to the waves of burned flesh. They all hurt, they hurt like a motherfucker, but being with Ray healed them quicker than they would have normally. Sadly, it didn’t mean he still wasn’t without some thick patches of gauze sometimes. If it was bad enough Ray would help out, which he was glad for. He’d ended up with some really nasty damage to his face after a grenade at one point; it had ruined his mask, the bastards, but Ryan was glad Ray had been able to fix his eye socket. Thinking back to the way he’d seen the world when his eye had been out of its socket brought back waves of nausea from the vertigo.

Lately though, Ray was starting to get antsy, visibly so, which in and of itself was enough to make Ryan ask questions. In the months they’d spent together, he’d learned pretty well that there wasn’t much that bothered Ray. But to see him fidgeting and looking over his shoulder had shards of ice and worry lodged in Ryan’s gut.

“I thought I was paranoid.”

“What?”

Ray’s eyes on him after he posed the question in the shocking quiet of a subway car one evening is enough to confirm that Ray really IS worried about something. As if it weren’t obvious before. There was no one around them, and there hadn’t been all night. Ryan knew when he was being trailed, and they hadn’t been. It was just the two of them right now.

His hand settled on Ray’s knee and the lad jolted a little, huffing out a hard breath, either annoyed with Ryan for scaring him, or annoyed with himself for BEING scared. He lifted a hand, pushing it up under his glasses to rub at his eyes, heaving a long but soft sigh through his nose.

“It’s not paranoia if there’s a good reason, Rye.”

Tilting his head in a little, his hand didn’t leave Ray’s knee, but he did tilt himself to try to be able to see his partner’s face a little better. 

“You can tell me what’s up.”

Ray looked back up at him, a flicker behind his eyes always made Ryan’s stomach twist in a way that even after the long time spent together, he’d yet to figure out if it was a good or a bad way. He’d eventually just said it was the feeling of Ray. Ray closed his eyes slowly and shook his head.

“I knew it was a bad idea, and…” Another sigh. He slumped back in his seat on the subway. Before he could let the tension loose from his muscles the car jolted to a stop at the station. He sat up straight as a board, and Ryan could almost swear he could see a ripple to the air around him. It wasn’t something new, he’d noticed it now and then, little quirks about Ray being a reaper that he’d tuned himself into seeing a little clearer.

He looked over his shoulder as the doors opened and out into the empty platform, the lights flickering once or twice down here in the tunnels. Ryan looked back at Ray, moving his hand to set it on his shoulder, trying to ease him.

“Ray, it’s three in the morning. There’s not gonna be anyone. There hasn’t been anyone for the last six stops.”

The muscle in Ray’s jaw twitched but he eased when the doors shut and the car started to pull forward again. He didn’t settle back in his seat though, and instead stood up, pacing the car, rubbing the stubble on his jaw, eyes flicking up to look at Ryan every time he passed. Seeing him like this, it was unnerving. It was upsetting, honestly.

Eventually Ray stopped his pacing, holding onto one of the poles in the middle of the floor. Ryan looked him up and down, the concern clear on his face. Ray looked at him, face scrunching up a little before he sighed.

“You look like I punched your dog, dude.”

“No, I’m just… I wanna say you’re jumpy, but this is like, uh, jumping spider or something.”

“Jumping spider?” Ray said incredulously, smirking a little.

“Kangaroo was the next jumpy metaphor.”

“The Harlem Globetrotters,” Ray offered.

Ryan snapped and pointed at him, “There’s another one!” He paused, smiling, “Yes, what a good metaphor, you remind me of the Harlem Globetrotters.”

Ray barked a laugh, grinning like mad with just a few too many teeth before he shook his head at the silly, stupid antics. Ryan was glad he could make Ray laugh like this, especially with how rocky their relationship had started as. This kind of vulnerability and openness made his heart lurch. When he looked back up at Ryan it was with a softer expression, a softer smile, and it all melted back into the concern and worry. The slight reprieve from the stress disappeared as soon as it had come.

He pulled his beanie off his head to stuff it in his hoodie pocket, looking Ryan over again before he leaned against the pole, his weight supported against his shoulder. 

“I should have told you sooner but after a month, I thought we were in the clear. I guess not. I thought, shit, they haven’t done anything yet, they’re not gonna. But I guess shit’s slow, it took them a while, or… I don’t know, they thought I’d figure shit out sooner.”

Ryan listened, sitting back in his seat on the bench to shrink back into his jacket a little. He was wholly uncomfortable with how this all sounded. He didn’t know who Ray was talking about, some big conceptual ‘they’, some threat looming, something enough to scare Ray. It didn’t bode well for Ryan if Ray was unsettled.

He hazarded a question, his tongue heavy in his mouth, “Who are THEY, Ray?”

The reaper paused his troubled ranting to look at Ryan, pulled from wherever he’d been to rattle off his worries. He drew a slow breath, letting it out even slower.

“The other reapers.”

The shards of ice and worry cracked and spread, like frost across grass, like a spiderwebbed windshield, like a shattered mirror. He felt sick.

“What do you mean?”

“Other reapers, Ryan. You didn’t think I was the only one. You met Mica!” Ray’s voice sounded a little more strained.

“N-no, no, I know there’s more reapers, I know Mica’s- I know there’s more. I just… What, are they gonna fight out? What should you have told me sooner?” Ryan paused. “What were they gonna do?” And his own voice strained a little more, his hands clenched hard into fists at his knees, “What were you supposed to… figure out sooner?”

Ray balked under all of it, cringing with each question, each shovel deeper into the pit. He ran his hands through his hair hard, his edges wavering a little. Ryan could see the creature beneath for a moment, the sharp white and the deep unending black. He returned to his pacing, like some caged animal.

When the car pulled to a stop again, he froze like a deer in the headlights to stare out the doors at the empty platform, the sounds of the sleepy city above them echoing down the stairs, through the tunnels. It was eerie really, and the way Ray stared as though he was bracing himself for something only made it worse.

When the doors shut he landed heaving in the seat across the car from Ryan, leaned forward with his elbows propped up on his knees to ruffle his already mussed hair more. He looked up at Ryan, jaw set.

“I wasn’t supposed to save you. You died, and I put your soul back. I wasn’t supposed to do that. It was my fault you died, but you should have stayed dead. And I thought they wouldn’t care, they didn’t give a shit for a the first month, for the first few months but now…”

He trailed off, shaking his head. He looked guilty, he looked…

Scared.

Ryan turned his hands over to look at them, then back at Ray, tucking his hands in against his own sides, hugging himself tight. He suddenly felt as though he might drift apart, that his grip on himself was the only thing keeping a shipwreck of driftwood from washing away.

In a way he’d known since that night he had been meant to die, that he’d died and that should have been the end of him, whatever the blame, he’d died. And for anyone else, that’s how it should have stayed. They collected souls daily, he’d seen so many people who could have just as easily been in his place, the wrong place at the wrong time. Ray could put any of their souls back and let them continue their lives, give them the gift of a second chance. But they never did, because it was against the rules, and when someone died, that was it. They were done.

Ryan should have been done.

But apparently Ray had decided otherwise.

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” Ray snapped out quietly, “Why what?”

Ryan looked back up at him, brows knit and his grip on himself no less tight, “Why did you- Jesus Ray- you broke reaper rules? For me? Why?”

Something crossed his face and he looked hurt, and the expression didn’t fade either. He glanced away, “We’ve been over this, Ryan. You’re just rehashing the same question again. Before it was ‘why did you bring me back?’ And now it’s ‘why did you break the rules?’ It’s the same answer now as it was then.”

The tension in his shoulders eased a little, but he stayed silent, he wanted to hear Ray say it more than he wanted to answer it for him. They both knew the other knew what they were talking about, but he wanted Ray to say it, he so rarely said it.

“I love you.”

Ryan let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding at the words and the sight of Ray’s soft, pained expression, his brows turned up in guilt.

“Sounds like that’s against the rules,” He answered quietly, his words laced with just as much guilt.

Ray licked his lips and stood up, stepping away, turning his back to Ryan. He held onto one of the poles, his shoulders drawn high and tight. Ryan wanted to reach out, wanted to hold his hand, wanted to ease him but at the end of the day, Ryan didn’t know how much stock he was meant to put into Ray’s worries. The other reapers, Ray knew far better the warning signs, and if they posed any sort of threat. With the way he acted, paranoid and panicked, Ryan was banking on yes.

“What’s gonna happen?”

Ray looked back at him, staring him down, “They’re gonna come. They’ve been watching for a little while, I guess to try to scare me out of keepin’ this up. They’re gonna come and…” He shook his head with a sigh, “I don’t know.”

Ryan’s brows knit and he blinked slowly, “You DO know. Don’t- don’t NOT tell me because you think- because you think it’ll be easier.”

Eyes jammed shut, he shook his head more, lips a thin line.

“They’re gonna kill us, Ryan. And it’s my fault.”

In the last few months the talk of death and dying had been more of a joke between them than anything else, and because of it he fluttered with a laugh that he didn’t let escape at first. His gut reaction at first was to laugh at how silly it was, how little it mattered, he would die, and Ray would bring him back and they’d get back to work. Simple as that. But the waver in Ray’s voice, the shake to his hands as they gripped the pole pale white, Ryan knew this wasn’t a joke. He was going to die, for good this time, and so was Ray.

“What are we supposed to fucking do then, Ray? Roll over and take it?”

“No!” Ray snapped, then reigned himself back in, running hands through his hair, “No, no, I’ll figure something out. It’s a misunderstanding, it’s gotta be.”

“What’s to misunderstand? You’re not meant to bring people back from the dead. You did. You broke the rules. There’s nothing grey there.”

Ray cringed more under what Ryan said and he knew the lad knew he was right. How could he think otherwise? Of course he knew, he’d been paranoid and hyper vigilant of their surroundings for days. Ryan hadn’t seen or heard anything though, but that didn’t mean the constant watch didn’t make him feel sick with just how paranoid it was making him. Were other reapers like Ray, did they all disguise themselves like he did? Mica had, sure, but did the others? Could it be just anyone on the street? Would Ryan recognize them even if he saw them? Would Ray?

He stood up slowly, coming to wrap a hand around Ray’s tight grip on the poll, pulling it away from the metal carefully so he could hold it.

“There’s gotta be some forgiveness somewhere. You said you did it because… you love me. So maybe they’ll see that as something to forgive. It was probably stupid, doing stuff for love is historically pretty dumb, but they might?” It was all Ryan could offer him.

Ray looked him over and turned, reaching to wrap his arms around Ryan’s chest. Seeing him so vulnerable after he’d been so jaded and hard, after he’d been so dangerous before. It made Ryan want to crumble. Ray had told him in the quiet of the evenings that he’d loved him, that he’d brought Ryan back to him because he’d been the first human to make him drop his guard, the first to back talk him, the first that really paid him mind, and the first he’d ever gotten to know. At the time Ryan had been flattered and honored, but the worry had crept in about how Ryan was just the first, and the first person you feel for is generally not the one you stay with for forever. Long lasting high school sweethearts were few and far between and love at first sight was far fetched at best.

And yet, having Ray close to him felt good. It made his soul sing, made the core of him reach for him, want to mold itself around him. Since being with Ray he’d become much more acutely aware of his soul and the way Ray made it feel fuller and brighter.

The car pulled to a stop at another station and Ray’s arms tightened around Ryan’s middle as his body pulled taut. He couldn’t see the platform behind him, but the platform ahead of him was fine. Both sides were open though, which meant that they were at the last stop. Ray’s shoulders shook in his embrace and he tightened his hug to hold him, trying to help him from shaking apart at the seams.

“End of the line boys, you’ve got nowhere the run. Just come quietly.”

The hair on the back of Ryan’s neck stood on end and he stared out at the empty platform, frozen. Ray had gone stock still as well. The voice was behind him, and Ray was watching whoever- whatever- over Ryan’s shoulder with wide, unblinking eyes. He looked catatonic more than shocked, more than afraid. After a long moment, he muttered something against Ryan’s shoulder.

“Run!”

Without a moment’s hesitation the two bolted out onto the opposite platform and the doors to the subway car closed behind them, either closing the threat in the car or on the other side, Ryan didn’t know. And instead of sticking around to figure it out, he was taking the stairs two at a time to find the surface again.

“You’re only making this harder on all of us, Ray!”

The words echoed after them, the gruff voice lilting with the amusement of the hunt, chasing them out into the city’s night air.


	8. Abandoned Los Santos Emporium

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a big one! Mind the tags with this chapter! I'd love to hear what you think here and on tumblr, [pastelprinceling](http://pastelprinceling.tumblr.com/). Enjoy!

The city blew by in a whirl of grey and chrome, neon lights whipping by in streams of colors out of the corners of Ray’s eyes. His hand clasped in Ryan’s was tight, crushing even, and some small spark of him hoped he wasn’t hurting him as he tugged him along behind him, frantic for somewhere to hide, some nook or cranny to push Ryan in while he drew off the dogs. He tripped down alleyways and across busy streets, and all the while he could hear them behind him, hear the sound of their breath like it was on the back of his neck, their heat, their drive.

The sound of Ryan struggling to keep up was louder though, and it only drove him to keep moving. He couldn’t let them hurt Ryan, and despite learning that the human was pretty damn capable of himself against thugs, Ray was sure the other reapers would tear him to shreds. What did a human have to stand against a pack of reapers out for blood anyway? Even just one could rend him limb from limb without much thought. That was the problem though, Ray was trying to protect something so fragile, so easily broken that even by accident he himself might just break him.

To say he’d grown fond was an understatement. In the months he’d been with Ryan, in the time he’d spent next to him, on rooftops and in alleyways and in the barren nothing surrounding the city, and in his bed, Ray had grown impossibly fond. He loved Ryan, truly. At first it had been curiosity and a crush he couldn’t admit to, but now each time Ryan died, Ray felt his own core tug. He would claim, if he were a different creature, that it was his very soul tugging at the loss, even temporarily, but he knew very well it wasn’t his soul; he didn’t have one.

It had become because of that tug, the feelings he felt, the want to keep Ryan close, that became why he brought him back time and time again and kissed him breathless when he returned. The wait for the soul to finally settle comfortably back inside the body, it always took far too long for Ray’s taste, and there was a time or two that the damage to Ryan’s body was nearly too much for the soul to accept being put back. Those were times he nearly regretted bringing him back: the pain was unimaginable to him.

But somehow, Ryan always seemed to grin and bear it, no matter how bad he hurt, no matter how badly his body had been damaged, he always kissed Ray back with the same desperate ferocity.

It broke Ray’s heart to think that they were going to kill him, and he was simply drawing out the inevitable, but maybe, if he drew it out long enough, he’d have enough time to come to terms with his lover’s fate, and find it in himself to accept the loss. Right now though, shoes loud on the pavement and through the puddles, the sound of their rushing and their panting, panicked breaths, Ray simply wasn’t ready to accept it.

It was an abandoned open air shopping center, and Ray growled internally at how convenient it all was. They’d given up the chase, bored with the hunt and ready for the kill, finally, after being stalked for days on end. The fountain had long since been bone dry, the tiles cracked and worn. Sweat clung to Ryan’s brow when Ray stopped him, and the words sprang to his lips and Ray cut him off.

“We can’t run anymore. They’ve got us surrounded, Rye. We’re gonna have to fight.”

His eyes lingered on Ray’s for a moment before they darted away, looking down the few halls for their pursuers, but Ray’s gaze led him higher, into the second floor and the rusted railings. Even higher still there were more, with Ray and Ryan stood at the bottom, in the center of it all. They were all stood on one side, but Ray knew they were still surrounded. He’d only’ been able to move so fast with Ryan in tow and it hadn’t been fast enough. The sky far above a murky grey, threatening to rain but not quite.

“It really would just be easier if you two just stopped running, and man, fighting is gonna suck. Why can’t you just own up to your mistakes and take the consequences?”

The voice came from a tall man with dark hair and tired eyes. Geoff. He wore a suit, and seeing him so dapper made Ray roll his eyes. Suits were intimidating to most people, but it was all just the reaper’s guise. Was he still trying to keep from scaring Ryan? Ray could and would assure them, if given the chance, Ryan was made of tougher stuff, he’d tested that shit personally.

Ray shook his head, feigning nonchalance in the face of what would be Ryan’s demise, and very likely his own for breaking rules, especially knowingly, for so long.

“Can you really blame us when the consequences are not living anymore?”

“Are you really alive now, though?” Another called, slender with sharp features and even sharper eyes. Gavin. The sunglasses did very little to hide the prying, eager eyes. Eyes eager for blood. Their guises in general did very little to mask their true intent, staring down at the pair of them like Christmas dinner.

“You know exactly what I mean, don’t be an asshole, Gavin.”

A few snickered low laughs at the reaper’s expense and he pouted, clear and childish, avoiding looking at Ray now that he’d offended him.

Geoff spoke up again, gesturing with a heavily tattooed hand to the rest of the reapers perched up on the catwalks, “We honestly don’t wanna have to do this, Ray. We like you. You’ve been here for ages-”

“Then don’t.”

Ray turned to look at Ryan who’d spoken up. He stared at him for a long moment and none of the reapers said anything in response, shocked into silence at the human’s bravery, at his stupidity. And instead of balking under their eyes, he spoke up again, making Ray’s heart leap to his throat with the fear of them leaping into action at the audacity.

“You’re the enforcers. Laws don’t mean anything if you don’t follow through with them. Rules don’t matter if there’s no one who agrees to keep up with the consequences of supposed wrongdoings.” They all stared long and unblinking down at him, not a single eye on Ray, “If you don’t wanna do this, then don’t.”

The laughter started then, loud and sharp, like a gunshot in the quiet, auburn curls and a smattering of freckles and eyes like fire. Michael.

“You really know how to pick ‘em, Ray. Do you go for the stupid ones on purpose, or what?” His lips pulled back from his teeth a little, his tone shifting from almost lighthearted teasing to something angry and bitter, “We’re the dogs, idiot. If we don’t do our job, we get put down. Just like if we break the rules we get put down. If we refuse, we’re killed instead and someone ELSE is put through to come after the treasonous fucks who make everything harder on ALL of us.”

He pointed hard to a woman standing on the end, having avoiding looking at them as much as she could the entire encounter, standing in the shadow of one of the pillars. Her reluctance was the clearest in her body language. Mica.

“You think SHE wants to be here?” He snapped out. Ray watched her shrink back just a little farther, her lips a tight line as all the eyes shifted to her. “She actually LIKES you guys. I mean, we all do, but she REALLY likes you two.”

Ray felt bad she had to be here for this. He’d done her a big favor and they were good friends. Seeing her reluctance was almost reassuring, if he didn’t know she was still here to see he and Ryan dead. She’d warned him though, she’d told him Ryan was dangerous.

He caught their attention again with another sharp, bitter laugh, “And she’s still here! Because if she didn’t come out on this man hunt, she’d be subject to the Jury for treason too! You’ve been at this so long, Ray, you’re not even GETTING a trial, but she got out of having to face their scrutiny because she’s here today.”

Ray watched Michael’s mouth brighten with each angry exclamation, the heat bubbling up in his chest, stream starting to roll from his lips.

“And you’re gonna have to kill her, just like you’re going to have to kill ALL of us, if you even wanna hope of gettin’ out of this. But it’s not gonna matter, yknow? You get through us, and they’re gonna send more of us. More dogs. They’re gonna send reapers who DON’T care, who DON’T like you, and who WON’T make it as quick and as painless as they can. The Jury’s gonna send reapers who make your life HELL because you just don’t know when to leave well enough alone.”

“This is your idea of mercy?!” Ray snapped back suddenly, and he could feel his own guise slipping with the sudden rush of anger pulling through him like the fire he could see crackling through Michael’s chest. “You think hunting us for a week and then trapping us here is merciful? That you’re doing us a fuckin’ favor, dude?”

No one said anything, and Ray could only stare up at all of them with an accusatory snarl on his lips, “You’ve been toying with us for a week. I haven’t been able to properly solidify because I think one of you fucks is around every corner!”

“And you should!” Another called, all fiery red and blonde hair, a light from the center of her chest like Michael’s, her lips red like blood and pomegranates. Lindsay. She was standing up on the highest catwalk, above where Geoff stood, exposed to the roiling clouds above. “If you hadn’t run, we wouldn’t have had to chase you!”

“If you hadn’t broken the rules at all!” The man next to her left added, looking from her down to the pit Ray and Ryan seemed to have found themselves in, small and insignificant, like ants. His arms were pulled behind his back, his stance wide. His hair was the same sharp red Lindsay’s lips were. Jeremy, Ray recalled his name to be. He was a new reaper.

“Is pointing fingers and throwing around accusations really helping anything?” The last reaper spoke up, voice heavy but calm, standing at Lindsay’s other side, stuttered from where Geoff was standing. A short orange bob and a godawful print shirt, they were always the voice of reason and Ray craved their mediation right now. Jack. He was grasping for straws, obviously, but any leeway might help.

“No, but what’s it hurting?” Gavin asked, still pouting a little, “If you just kill ‘em, they’re never gonna know WHY they fucked up so bad.”

“I think they already know, Gavin,” Geoff answered, drawing the attention back to himself, “They know why we’re here, and I don’t know that any of us LIKE IT, but this is where it’s come. I just feel bad for the human.”

Michael scoffed, rolling his eyes with a snarl. Ray’s chest ached to see that expression at the mention of Ryan.

“The Jury isn’t gonna budge on this anymore, Ray. If you’d just confessed sooner, if you’d given up this charade sooner- if you’d just fallen in bed with it- they could forgive that. They forgave Mica.”

Mica sighed, turning back to look at them all, her heart very clearly not in her voice, “Gavin’s right, this doesn’t matter any more. Talking is just… it’s just more stalling.”

“This isn’t fair!” Ryan exclaimed suddenly, loud and desperate, “This isn’t right! There’s gotta be a fair trial, for both of us! Breaking a rule once, it’s- there’s gotta be SOME room for forgiveness!”

The reapers were all beginning to shift and warp, their guises melting away. Ray put a hand up quickly, tugging Ryan closer to him. The monsters underneath showed through the mortal flesh, leaving the creatures bare to the world, every eye still bearing down on the both of them.

“There’s no more fighting this, Ray. It doesn’t matter what you or your human think is fair, it’s not something you get to decide! You need to take your punishment.”

Geoff’s voice echoed from his direction, though is mouth didn’t move. He didn’t even have a mouth anymore. A ram skull with massive, swooping horns, thinner and longer. A will-o-wisp caught between the highest arches flickered shadows down along the features of the skull, worn and cracked in places. A wicked tail whipped around, the end of it tipped with a curved blade reminiscent of the scythe he settled heavy onto his shoulder. It’s blade was the same rainbow oil slick Ray’s little carving knife was.

Ray felt the tremor run through Ryan as he stared up at each reaper in turn, taking in each monstrous form one by one.

“Can you at least do us one last favor and TRY to go out with some damn dignity at least?”

Geoff gestured and it took a moment for the message to be answered, and Mica leapt from the balcony, miles of flowing, tattered black fabrics, a cloak and a dress, her body shrouded in it all, save for the sharp purple of her eyes and the silver lavender of her hair. Silvery spectral arms shot from her back as she descended like a shot from the next story up. Ray leapt backwards, pulling Ryan a few steps back as she landed heavy, arms shooting out from her back to grasp and pull at them, trying to drag the two of them closer.

The stands were like a chorus of shouts, egging her on, taunting her to do better, to rip them to pieces. Ray was already brandishing his blade, shining bright in his grip as he slashed hard at the arms reaching and grasping and pulling at him, cutting each away with a fizzle of energy only for two more to take it’s place like some hydra. Beside him Ryan was doing similar, wrestling with them, ducking out of the way of some, darting away and around the fountain to escape their reach as Ray pushed back against her.

The purple of her eyes shimmered and Ray’s chest tightened. He and Mica were good friends. He and Ryan were fond of her, and she of them. She wasn’t fighting him with any real intent, he’d sparred with her before. He knew she was better than this, she was feistier, but this was real, and this mattered, and she didn’t want to do this.

But it was her, or Ryan. Ray’s own self preservation had gone out the window the moment Geoff had motioned for the first of the dogs, and the hollarings for blood, for death-

Ray brought his blade up into her center, through the tatters of the cloak. He never connected with more than fabric, but she dispersed all the same, the hands all fizzling at the same time, and the tatters of the cloak hung heavy off his arm, no longer animated, no longer driven to end him.

Ray wasn’t given a chance to take a breath, to think about what he’d just done before Geoff made a sharp sound. He looked up quickly, just quickly enough, to see Michael land heavy in front of him, the pavement bowing and breaking under him.

Forearms thick as trees, his chest lit with fire and lava, all the way up into his throat and the steam poured from his mouth like fog. Spines down his back were razor sharp, long and menacing. He pulled his arm back and back handed Ray hard, slamming his body into the fountain, dilapidated and already broken. It crumbled under the hit, crashing down around him, half burying him under the cement and old stone.

Ryan’s shout had him pushing hard against it, trying to free himself. His own guise was slipping, and even put up against monsters, he wanted to stay human, at least in appearance, for Ryan. The human had shown him so much more value in the human fallacy than he’d ever thought possible, and since, the guise had felt so much more comfortable. But even then, it was still slipping and his fingers were sliding through the cracks in the rubble rather than pushing the rocks aside. He growled out as he watched Ryan taking the stairs of the broken escalator two at a time to get away from Michael’s advances, the reaper bigger and slower than his human guise.

Ray watched Ryan turn and slice Michael with his own blade, cutting him deep enough along the face that the fire and lava that ran through his veins spattered hot against the metal of the escalator railing, hissing as it melted through it. Ryan stared at it for a moment while Michael recoiled from the knife to his face before darting up the rest of the stairs, spilling out onto the second floor. Michael snarled a booming sound, pushing farther up after him, awkward in such a tight space.

Pushing the last of the rubble off him, Ray’s human form melted away. He valued what Ryan had taught him, but right now this wasn’t a fight between humans, and the guise was only serving to slow him down, keep him from doing all he could to keep the two of them safe. He melted into an inky blackness, deep and unending, not like the shimmer of oil, simply darkness, suspended in the air and flexing and flowing like water.

He darted up after Michael, wrapping himself around his ankle, pulling him back enough he couldn’t reach Ryan. The human rushed through the second story and looking ahead, seeing Geoff standing with his scythe on his shoulder waiting for him to run right to him, Ryan pulled to a halt, running back the other way, back towards the stairs. He passed Ray trying to wrestle Michael into submission, his body molding around his limbs, trying to stop him from moving, from getting to Ryan. There was a hissing sound, smoke coming from between them where Michael’s body was too hot for Ray’s to handle being close to for so long.

He pushed through, wrapping more of his body around Michael’s, pulling himself a little thinner to do it despite the burning sensation echoing through him. It hurt everywhere, not just where they were joined. Ray’s inky darkness wrapped around Michael’s throat and he squeezed, trying to put the fire out.

Michael fought back, of course he did. Mica hadn’t wanted to fight, but Michael was angry, he was bitter, he was out for blood. He was hurting. None of them wanted to do this, Ray could feel it in all of them. True that they had no auras, but it was still a core deep knowing, that the other reapers were all in various states of duress with this whole ordeal. He wished though, that it meant they wouldn’t go through with it.

At the end of the day, he supposed, it gave them even more incentive to do it themselves, rather than let someone who wouldn’t respect Ray at the very least. He could appreciate that, even if it pissed him the hell off it had to happen at all. The inevitability of the situation weighed on him like a rock, heavy and unrelenting. He wasn’t going to win this, and he was going to lose Ryan. All for some twisted rules and regulations about stupid shit.

Michael fought and snarled and screamed, a roar that echoed through the abandoned shopping mall with all of it’s hallways and empty shops and rocked the place’s foundation. Ray pushed on though, fighting back against him. Michael didn’t want to kill him and he didn’t want to kill Michael either, but maybe, just maybe, even under the weight of the rock he’d posed as an inevitable death, maybe he and Ryan could get away. If they could hide for long enough, they might forget. Sure it might take a few hundred years, but as long as Ryan stayed close, Ray wouldn’t lose him to another’s reaping.

After having run the other direction away from Geoff who simply stood idly by to watch the human panic, he’d gone for the stairs again, and before he was able to take them down, Gavin landed heavy on the landing, a flurry of wings and the click of spikes on tile. Wings for arms, the feathers weren’t quite feathers, but instead thin layers of rock with heavy cleavage. Everything below his knees ended in a razor sharp point, tinging as he eased himself towards Ryan. His body too, looked grey, made of stone and rock. Ryan stood his ground, seeing himself bigger and stronger.

A wing sliced down at him in an arc and he ducked under it. It hit the pillar next to him and concrete from the pillar and shards of the rocks that made up his wing scattered in a dusty mess. Gavin took no note of it and moved to hit him again, the motion not unlike a backhand if he had proper arms.

His voice was sudden and shrill, “Stay still!”

Ryan ducked the second and leaned in to try to gain ground on him. The long winged arms were put him at a distance disadvantage and he couldn’t do it. He brought the knife in to try to slice his chest, only to have it scrape off harmlessly, bringing with it dust and pebbles, but barely making a dent. He didn’t manage to back up far enough to get out of the way of the second swing, the rock hard wing slamming into his chest and knocking him back, off his feet and across the tile floor. He skidded to a halt but the tinging of those spiked legs on the floor was like his rapid heartbeat, slamming hard and fast and echoing in his ears.

Michael was starting to go limp underneath Ray, his inky form having been pulled and sliced, forming back against itself slowly, repairing the damage Michael did while also working so hard to squeeze the life from him. He was like a vice tight around his throat, and Michael was fading- finally! Ray’s own form was shaking with the effort, with the unease. He hadn’t wanted to, but it was necessary. He might have been blase about humans before, but reapers were his kind, his kin, and to snuff out their lights was far more difficult than to take the life of a human.

When he finally went lax, his core was cold, the lava in his chest that burned Ray’s body (if it could be called that) had cooled, his heart not pumping the thick liquid through him anymore. Slowly, carefully, Ray unwound himself from Michael’s throat and his body went limp against the tile.

There was a harpy screech from above and he looked up in time to see Lindsay descend on him like a bird of prey, sharp claws and exposed bone, her own core exposed in the center of her ribcage, bright white like grasping fingers. She was alight with a vicious, vengeful fire, eyes sharp and face pulled in a snarl. She was beautiful and terrifying, all the more so for Michael’s corpse on the floor between them.

He backed up a step or two, his form shifting and bubbling as he tried to regain some semblance of human form, his knife in his hand again, shining like oil. Ray backed up towards where he knew Gavin had knocked Ryan back, worrying for him, but he turned to look and Ryan was pulling himself to his feet. Gavin was on him after a nasty hit and he slammed his knife in his sheath. Instead, he put his fists up and Ray desperately hoped he knew what he was doing. He was so weak compared, such a fragile human.

Ray didn’t have time to pay him much mind, to help him fight off Gavin’s advances, because Lindsay was on him, dragging him to the ground where she pinned him easily, claws sinking into his body, pulling at the inky darkness that made him up, tearing it away, spattering dark liquid across the pavement in speckles like blood with each vicious claw. Tendrils pushed and looped around her arms but she pulled them off when he did, and the orb at the center of her being pulsed with her anger.

Ryan swung and fought against Gavin, bringing his swings hard and brutal. He was fighting for his life after all, and Gavin wasn’t pulling punches either. Hearing Lindsay shriek behind him though, he turned to look at her descend on Ray, and when he saw Michael’s body slack under the both of them fighting, he turned back to Ryan, eyes glittering. He stared at him for a long moment before he pushed in on him hard, pulling back to kick him with one of his razor sharp legs.

Taken by surprise by a new kind of attack like this, having just been blocking hard knocks of his wing arms, it worked, and Gavin caught him in the side of the stomach, spearing through his leather jacket and into his belly.

Blood started welling up immediately but before Gavin could follow through, the sound of the struggle behind him was enough to keep him slightly off kilter, and Ryan brought a punch hard into his solar plexus. The rock gave way under his fist and caved inwards. Gavin screamed high and loud, his chest breaking under the pressure. When Ryan pulled his hand back, he saw that Gavin was hollow, and that his insides were a glittering geode of emeralds. Snarling at him, bringing a wing up to protect his center, off balance from kicking Ryan, the human took any opening he could and reached up to grab the reaper’s head.

Pulling down hard, he braced himself when he slammed Gavin’s face down into his knee. It didn’t give way at first and getting a wing to the gut hurt, but he was already pinned to the wall, so he had nowhere to go, and he did it again. He felt his face give way against his knee and Ryan growled at the feeling of something so visceral.

Gavin’s body went limp in a heap, his wings breaking more rock loose, his chest weakened, pieces crumbling off. Ryan stared down at him, and his face was the same as his chest, a geode filled with emeralds, bright and shining where the reaper’s face once was.

Ray fought to keep hold of his humanoid form under Lindsay, fought to keep his grip on his knife. She was going to kill him if she kept it up, he was bleeding, he was thinning. Ray struggled to fight back and when he’d gotten both her hands bound at once, despite her pulling and clawing them loose again, he brought his carving knife up into the orb that was suspended inside her empty ribcage, sinking into it like a jelly, squishy and sickening.

Lindsay went stock still as he did, and he stared up at her, even without a face, without real discernable eyes, Ray watched as she stared down at him in return, eyes glassy. It started with the hands clutching at him, his own black blood on her hands. Her limbs turned to ash, crumbling away slowly, smelling like embers and heat, then her ribs, and farther up still into her face. She blinked quickly, as though blinking back tears, as she crumbled to ash completely, a dusty mess falling onto him. The orb he’d punctured landed heavy in the ash, the light dimming to nothing.

Ray pushed the ash and dust that had once been Lindsay off him, curling in on himself in a loose ball to pull back from them, inching back towards Ryan, trying to see if the human, if HIS human, was alright. Ray could smell the blood on him, and he himself was dripping darkness against the tiles under them.

Ryan reached out for him, and Ryan met it with a hand of his own, nothing but the blackness that made up his true being, but shaped like a hand nonetheless, a reassurance.

The sound of fire crackling behind them made Ray turning, pulling Ryan behind himself a little. The orb he’d stabbed was suspended in the air, the ash that had been scattered around Michael’s corpse was swirling into a cloud, whipping in circles like a little dirt devil around the orb at the center.

Far up on high, Jack’s three heads had swapped and another spoke now, voice low and booming, “You’re both wounded. Just give up!”

There was a desperation to their voice, and it made Ray’s core wrench, that much angrier for anything like pity, like sympathy, like REMORSE.

Ray’s form bubbled like it was boiling, popping and roiling as he watched Lindsay reform, the stark white ribs knitting themselves back together around her own core.

“You’re not going to win, please, just stop fighting it!” Jack’s third voice asked, always a voice of reason, no matter which of the three spoke.

“Shut up, Jack!” Geoff snapped, face hard, lips pulled back into a snarl not dissimilar to any of the others he’d seen today. Angry, but with a regretful bitterness.

“Geoff, this is wrong!”

Geoff was on them in a moment, having blinked out of existence where he’d been standing, and was stood beside them instead. Jack’s cloaks fluttered in the breeze so high up, no legs under the skirts, hands clasped hard, almost as if in prayer. Ray had only seen Jack fight once, and he hoped they wouldn’t fight today, despite this being desperate measures. Jack reaped as peacefully as they could, didn’t fight for the souls they ferried but this was a different situation all together, and he could see them wearing thing.

“Either do something, or you start running too. It’s this or the Jury, Jack, you KNOW this.” Geoff’s hand came around behind the bottom head, just above their shoulders, fingers curling in their hair, his voice softer, almost sad, “It’s him or us.”

Jack’s three heads spun rapidly, pulling from Geoff’s grip before settling so the first was hovered above their shoulders to speak, the head with the cute orange bob. They nodded slowly. When posed like that, Ray could see where it would be something to push you. He was still standing because at the end of the day it was them or he and Ryan.

Despite something that should have been touching, Ray couldn’t ignore the fact that Jeremy was also high above them, watching like an attack dog just eager for a command. Torso smooth up into a neck and head, he had no arms, but Ray knew that didn’t mean he was anything less. He himself didn’t even have a physical form with a proper shape, and he’d never seen Jeremy fight either. He worried for what he could do, and when Geoff would let loose the dog. Lindsay was still reforming to their left, suspended above her lover’s body.

Taking what might be the only moment to spare, Ray melted backwards against Ryan, molding himself around his arm and up and across him, more and more, muttering quietly, without a mouth, “Don’t panic. Try to hold your breath.”

As he engulfed more of Ryan, he stretched himself thinner. He felt Ryan’s heart quicken, his breathing slow as he tried to do what he was told. Before Ray could cover more than half of him though, a streak of light ricocheted, slicing through both he and Ryan, shallowly for the human, but a puncture clean through for Ray. More darkness leaked from the hole left in him as he worked to knit himself closed again, pain making the edges of his form ripple.

“Now Jeremy!”

Before Ray could properly pull himself from Ryan again, or work to fully engulf him, the tiles of the floor they were stood on shattered, scattering shards all around. Jeremy stood up from the crater he’d left, windmill kicking towards them. He landed heavy again and injured and bleeding heavily, Ray was sluggish and moving slow. Trying to cover Ryan to get the two of them away in a moment of distraction only restricted Ryan’s movement, his own body stretched thin to try to cover him. Jeremy’s foot came up hard, slamming hard into Ryan’s chest with enough force it knocked the both of them back into the wall.

They hit hard enough Ryan coughed up blood with the force of the impact, crumpling to the ground in a heap. Ray had been dragged with him, helpless to do much when he was still so tightly wound around his leg and arm, pulling away difficult when he could feel himself dying. He he was, he knew he was. There was black streaked all over the tiles and the concrete, a mess of his own being smeared like paint. But maybe- maybe he could still get Ryan out. The wound in his side wasn’t too bad, right? He’d get up, right?

Ray could still feel his heart beating hard, his pulse fast, but he could also feel the way he struggled to breathe, struggled to move with how sore he was, with how his muscles locked up.

“Come on, Rye. You gotta get up. There’s- there’s only a couple left. And then we… we can rest, alright?”

Ryan chuckled, spitting blood out against the pavement before he shook his head, looking up at Jeremy looming over them. He had arms now, not attached to his body, but floating just off his shoulders. The hovered in front of him as he moved them to crack his knuckles, smiling at the human at his feet and the reaper all but incapacitated beside him.

It was a miracle they’d made it this far.

As Jeremy pulled back to bring a punch down, bracing himself for something earth shattering, Ray spread himself out immediately, razor sharp spikes like a massive flail in any direction apart from Ryan he could. He made himself big, so big, like a shield, like a bubble. Jeremy stopped mid swing and looked down at himself and the dozen punctures as big as fists Ray had punched in him. His eyes shifted then, to Lindsay beside him, and the rose in her fist.

Stretching himself so thin, pulling himself so tight and then pushing himself in a rush to try to stave off any more pain, he’d exposed his own core. A rose bud with silk petals, the flower now clutched in Lindsay’s talons, and he could feel himself slipping as she pulled it from his center.

Like a bucket of water dumped on him, when she pulled free his core, Ray’s body collapsed, nothing to suspend him, black ink spreading like a flood across the pavement and all across Ryan’s clothes, seeping into his jeans and shirt.

Jeremy crumpled as well, too injured from Ray’s last ditch effort to keep himself upright, though he struggled to breathe, rolling onto his side to see Geoff and Jack come around the two sides of the middlemost floor of the mall.

Ray struggled to even stay conscious, and he supposed, it was less consciousness and more his life itself that he clung to. All he could feel was Lindsay’s tight grip, crushing, suffocating. Still, he coughed out a bitter laugh.

“This is some Romeo and Juliet tragedy bullshit.”

“Fitting, huh?” Ryan answered, “You don’t see the irony, Ray?”

“Oh I do, I just don’t think it’s funny,” Ray cut out bitterly, an almost amused edge to his voice.

The only true weapon seen in any of their grip was the scythe in Geoff’s hand. It shone like diamonds and stars, like a galaxy sharpened to a deadly point. Ray felt himself exchange hands as Lindsay handed him to Geoff. Geoff used the end of the scythe to tilt Ryan’s head up so he could look down at the human.

“You shouldn’t have been so much fuckin’ trouble, kid, but I can see why Ray liked you. You can take a hit and you keep coming back for more and… I think that might have been a sense of humor there too.”

Helpless in Geoff’s fist, he could feel his fingers, each and every one like a vice around him, choking him. What was worse was the feeling of his short crescent nails cutting into his petals, soft and silky, far beyond bruising. When he pulled the scythe away Ray gave Ryan credit for keeping his head up despite his wounds and the reapers who had, in the end, won out.

Geoff busied his hands with picking Ray apart, petal by petal, each silky little leaf dropped unceremoniously to the ground. Ryan watched each fall, not quite understanding what it all meant, but Ray could feel an overwhelming sadness in his human, his Ryan. God, it hadn’t taken long at all to become so close to him, to become possessive and to love him. And now all of this bullshit. And for what? Ray didn’t know.

With Jack on his left and Lindsay putting the finishing touches on her own reformation, alight with an inner fire that couldn’t be snuffed out, the phoenix she was, Geoff picked the bud clean, scattering the petals underfoot. And when he was done, he pressed the end of his scythe to Ryan’s chest, having him sit up more.

As the edges of himself faded, he felt Ryan’s soul leave his body.

The scythe slicing through his gut, tearing him from his body, this time for good. Ray wasn’t able to help him put himself back together. He couldn’t kiss his bruises and rub cream into the nasty burns. He couldn’t stitch up superficial wounds or mend broken bones. He couldn’t kiss him to take the pain away.

Geoff kicked Ray’s petals to scatter across the pavement, biting out quietly, “Get rid of them,” and Ray’s world went back.

For all their sake, Ray hoped Ryan’s trial with the Jury would be swift and just and he hoped to god that vengeance was just as deadly.


	9. Epilogue

Crouching low, Mica’s fingers closed around a rose petal under the edge of the hedge. She pulled it out to turn it over in her hand, stroking fingers along its fleshy underside before she set it as gently as she could in the little bag on her hip. It wasn’t all of them, but each one she found was one step closer to fixing this wrong they had all contributed to.

She thumbed through her phone, past Ray’s contact and their last conversation into a group conversation she had with a few of the other reapers who were still willing to try to fix this mess. The text from Michael that simply read ‘2 more’ was the only recent message, but it was a reassurance. With her petal, they were three total closer.

The darkness that had cradled Ray for far too long was lessening with each passing day but his time to meditate and think on his end had only furthered the feeling that had eaten him alive the afternoon the other reapers had descended on him like vultures. One way or another, he was going to have his revenge. Perhaps not against the dogs who had been sent, but definitely the ones holding the leashes. Every moment he was lost to the darkness of death, the ever expanding nothingness, the dreams of what was meant to be a blessed slumber only warped into even more gruesome nightmares.

The Jury had taken it’s time of course, leaving Ryan’s soul locked away for what felt, to him, like decades, a few centuries, a millennium or so of nothingness, the white numbness of limbo. He too had grown jaded and bitter in his time left to exist and also not exist, trapped with consciousness but without any way of cutting loose, no hope of escape.

When they did finally call on him, he was exhausted, bone tired from an eternity in purgatory.

“You are deemed worthy of working for us. You will be given a blade and an assignment as soon as you are seen to have settled into yourself again. Your skills in your life before were nothing short of impressive and your gumption was more than entertaining. We would say that this is a second chance for you, but you are a special case. Our calculations say it’s closer to fifty fourth.”

“Fifty third,” came Ryan’s immediate response. If anyone knew how many times he had visited that hellish nightmare of nothingness, it was him, moreso after his last visit to reflect on every past visit. “Unless you wanna count this one as my fifty fourth, then sure, why not?”

The Jury was an amalgamation of jeers and laughter, but they quieted after a few moments.

“Details aside, Ryan, you are being given a new lease, we only hope that you consider the rules better this time, but that you are no less ambitious with how you carve your path and how you shape yourself. Don’t take our gift for granted.”

His world went dark, a chilling relief from the stark white that had blinded him for forever, and a rush of satisfaction sparked up his spine. The voices of the Jury echoed after him.

“Oh, and happy hunting.”

His hair stuck to his forehead, as though he hadn’t showered in a long time, longer than he’d remembered it being. Vision blurry and mouth tasting of grit and ash, his body ached like he’d been awake the entire time, and perhaps he had, however long they’d taken to decide his fate for him.

Mica was standing above him, waiting for him, a soft smile on her lips. Her voice was just as soft, trying not to startle him. “Well aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.” She held out her hand and carefully, Ryan took it, letting her help him to his feet. She supported him when his world span, but he found his footing easily.

A voice was like silk sliding over his brain, like rain on the pavement to wash away the blood and sins, like the hands of a lover caressing his face, lips against his own-

“So I think this means we’ve got one up on Romeo and Juliet, don’t you think?”

Ryan turned, and despite feeling like death warmed over after his fiasco with the Jury, seeing Ray, whole and healthy, color in his cheeks and a shine to his eye, was like a breath of life rushing through him, moreso than the actual life given back to him after it had been so cruelly snatched away. And having Ray in his arms again was even better. He was never going to let go. Not now, and not ever.

Surely though, Ray wiggled out of his grip, and when he looked down at him, the lad was holding a blade, a simple blade, not unlike his own carving knife, but distinctly different. He held it carefully before Ryan took it in his own hand with a little prompting. It fit like an extension of himself, like no weapon had before it.

Feeling the weight if it in his hand, and Ray’s fingers laced with his own, he knew that he had all he needed to bring about a scourge, the beginning of the end. The Jury wanted something entertaining, and that’s just what they were going to get.

There was hope, but it wasn’t without it’s own acrid bite of bitterness and wrathful retribution.

And boy was it ever sweet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this ends I'll Keep Coming, a really fun Halloween fic, my first fully finished and realized multichaptered fic! If you wanna talk about the universe, it's characters, or the outcome, please come pester me over on tumblr, [pastelprinceling](http://pastelprinceling.tumblr.com/)! I love talking about this sort of thing, AND you're early for new content over there!
> 
> Hope it was a wild ride, thanks for reading!


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